AWARDS AND HONORS

In 1999 the British Film Institute (BFI) ranked Kind Hearts and Coronets number six on its list of the Top 100 British films of all time.

In 2000 the British magazine Total Film voted Kind Hearts and Coronets as the 25th greatest comedy film of all time. In 2004 the magazine named it the 7th greatest British film of all time saying that the film was "a reminder that, once upon a time, British cinema could match anything that came out of Hollywood."

Kind Hearts and Coronets was nominated for a BAFTA Film Award as Best British Film.

Alec Guinness won Best Actor from The National Board of Review for his work in Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Kind Hearts and Coronets was nominated for a Golden Lion at the 1949 Venice Film Festival.

Time Magazine named Kind Hearts and Coronets as one of the 100 best movies of all time.

THE CRITIC'S CORNER – KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS

"Kind Hearts and Coronets...is a blue-ribbon British comedy filled with wit, irony and impudent fun. In detailing the memoirs of an Edwardian gentleman who systematically murders his way into the peerage, it combines the overcivilized urbanity and understatement of the English comic style with the saucy irreverence of the French comic spirit...Guinness' eight-role performance is a brilliantly successful tour de force, with each character so sharply defined and acted that it is hard to see how eight different players could have done as well. But it is a measure of the movie's quality that the rest of the picture does not fall in Guinness' shadow. Actress Hobson and Actor Price...perform impeccably, and Actress Greenwood exudes more sex appeal in her throaty voice than most Hollywood belles summon up from head to toe. All of them should be grateful to Writer-Director Robert Hamer and his co-scripter, John Dighton, for exceptional skill in concocting one of the best films of the year."
- Time Magazine

"Despite its murders and intrigues, its betrayals and blood feuds, Kind Hearts and Coronets has a dry and detached air, established by the memoirs of Louis, who maintains a studied distance from the evils he has committed...The movie is unusually dependent on voice-over narration, objective and understated, which is all the funnier by being so removed from the sensational events taking place. Murder, Louis demonstrates,...can be most agreeably entertaining, so long as the story lingers on the eccentricities of the villain rather than on the unpleasant details of the crime."
– Roger Ebert

"...Dennis Price is in top form, giving a quiet, dignified and polished portrayal. Greatest individual acting triumph, however, is scored by Alec Guinness who plays in turn all the members of the ancestral family."
– Variety

"If the Ealing Studios classic Kind Hearts and Coronets isn't the blackest of black comedies, then it may well be the driest: It's loaded with devastating slig dropped into the most formal of British sentences...it served as the model for all black comedies that followed."
– The A.V. Club

"Peerless black comedy of castoff member of titled family setting out to eliminate them all."
– Leonard Maltin, Movie and Video Guide

"This tart black comedy on the craving for social position and the art of murder has a brittle wit that came as a bit of a shock: such amoral lines were not generally spoken in 40s movies. The film is heartless, and that is the secret to its elegance."
- Pauline Kael

"An abundance of Alec Guinness, the delightfully clever young man who racked up a personal triumph in The Cocktail Party this past season on Broadway, is probably the first inducement to which the local community will respond in the cunning new British picture, Kind Hearts and Coronets. For in this delicious little satire on Edwardian manners and morals...the sly and adroit Mr. Guinness plays eight Edwardian fuddy-duds with such devastating wit and variety that he naturally dominates the film. And why not? The protean Mr. Guinness as eight members of a ducal clan that must be got around by a young kinsman bent upon becoming the duke is so deft in his brief impersonations, so sharp and trenchant in his economical thrusts, that with this one film he should garner three or four awards for fine support. But don't let this obvious admiration for Mr. Guinness obscure the fact that the picture itself is a sparkling and sometimes devilishly cutting jest or that the other performers in it are of excellent quality, too. Indeed, Dennis Price as the young man who coolly undertakes a monstrous scheme of killing off all his kinfolk in order to succeed to the family coronet is as able as Mr. Guinness in his single but most demanding role, and Joan Greenwood and Valerie Hobson are provocative as women in his life...For the fact is that such a story of unmitigated contempt for the fundamental laws of society could only be tolerable when played as a spoof-a spoof on the highest level of cultivated humor and device. And that, thanks to all who made this picture-and to Mr. Guinness' incredible skill at vivid impersonation-is what this picture is."
– The New York Times

"Disarmingly cool and callous in its literary sophistication, admirably low key in its discreet caricatures of the haute bourgeoisie, impeccable in its period detail (Edwardian), it's a brilliantly cynical film without a hint of middle-class guilt or bitterness."
- The TimeOut Film Guide

"The use off flashback works particularly well, since it allows a voice-over by Louis Mazzini which adds to the dry, black humour and gives the film greater cohesiveness. But perhaps the outstanding performance comes from Alec Guinness, who plays the roles of all eight relatives. This was a feat which was to make him a household name, and establish him as one of the leading British film actors. It is a rare film indeed which manages to make cold-blooded murder appear amusing. That this film succeeds admirably is a measure of the brilliance of the portrayal of polite society Edwardian England, and the charm, wit and elegance with which this black comedy is made."
- Matthew Bull, Edinburgh University Film Society

Compiled by Andrea Passafiume