Still from Kind Hearts and Coronets. Part of TIFF’s For Queen and Comedy: Classics from Ealing Studios.
This summer, the TIFF Bell Lightbox offers a retrospective of several splendid Ealing Studios post-Second World War comedies, which happen to combine social commentary with wild entertainment. Of the eight, this trio is not to be missed.
Released shortly before the similarly lab-set Monkey Business, you could call The Man in the White Suit (1951) The Unbreakable Sidney Stratton, thanks to its piercing satire on contemporary greed and mores. Alec Guinness stars as Sidney Stratton, an idealistic chemical engineer who is trying to market his miracle filament of indestructible cloth to the masses. Big Textile is having none of it. "Some fool has invented an indestructible cloth. Where is he? How much does he want?" bellows malevolent cabal boss John Kierlaw (Ernest Thesiger), draped in ermine. Even those Sidney is trying to help ("setting people free from shabbiness!") are against him. It's deeply cynical slapstick (explosions! nocturnal foot chases!) where capital and labour meet at the intersection of miraculous progress and vested interest. "The razor blade that never blunts, the car that runs on water and a pinch of something, where did they go?" one worker wonders. The industrial revolution calls it induced obsolescence, laddie.
"'Will you walk into my parlour?' said the Spider to the Fly." By The Ladykillers (1955), Guinness is chewing the dilapidated Ealing scenery with aplomb as Professor Marcus, obsequious buck-toothed tenant to the kindly, apple-cheeked widow Mrs. Wilberforce and her parrot. He and his band of cartoonish thieves take up residence in her parlour in the guise of a string quartet (watch for Peter Sellers as the working-class Harry). In lieu of minuet, they plot a heist. "I do wish you well with your efforts," Wilberforce says, oblivious – a loud cue that the whole thing will be steeped in irony. Visual gags ensue as their bumbling, best-laid plans go awry (they're hardly Ocean's Eleven) and Mrs. Wilberforce, a throwback to Victorian gentility already at odds with modern times, is appalled at their disgraceful behaviour. To hear her proper diction intone common criminal slang ("I kept all the lolly") is a thing of beauty. The gang may succeed in stealing the money but as their unwitting sixth accomplice, actress Katie Johnson's sweet but shrewd widow steals the picture.
Finally, in writer-director Robert Hamer's deadpan masterpiece Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), the act of murder is a work of art. Urbane Edwardian mama's boy Louis (Dennis Price) takes his revenge slowly in an exercise in methodical sangfroid. His kind mother was disinherited from her aristocratic family and banished after marrying below her class, and as he grows up to become a draper of atypical taste and sophistication, Louis keeps an eye on the births and deaths columns. Told in extended flashback with voice-over memoir narration, Louis recounts how successive surviving members of the D'Ascoyne family (each played to the hilt by Alec Guinness) meet their deaths by accident and misadventure – with bow and arrow, hot-air balloon or caviar bomb. As part of his long con and campaign to regain what he believes is his rightful place in the family as the next Duke of Chalfont, Louis dresses the part and insinuates himself among them and in particular Chalfont Castle, where he once took a sixpenny tour.
Like the very monsters of elegance and cruelty he decries, Louis barely bats an eye when an innocent bystander is dispatched in a sinking gondola, drily noting that she has already endured a fate worse than death during her weekend assignation with the Chalfont playboy. (It's also a particularly exemplary showing of Ealing costume designer Anthony Mendleson's prowess, from the Chalfont family's vestments, formal dress and exaggerated hunting tweeds to the women's draped taffeta dresses topped with elaborate hats festooned in silk flowers.) The increasingly absurd scene between Guinness (playing the simpleton priest of the family) with Price posing as Septimus Wilkinson from Matabeleland, presages the Pythons.
Like most of Ealing Studios' work, it's comedy at its blackest, most charmingly morbid.
For Queen and Comedy: Classics from Ealing Studios runs June 21 to August 1 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.