Saturday, September 14, 2024

Is Kind Hearts and Coronets the only nasty Ealing comedy?

Reading a recent London Review of Books, I came across Ruby Hamilton's review of three books by Celia Dale:

The appeal of Dale’s writing is clearly the same fetishisation* of English nastiness that bolstered the interwar 'golden age' of crime writing, ruled over by Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Agatha Christie, or the postwar Ealing comedies, best represented by Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949): "It is so difficult to make a neat job of killing people with whom one is not on friendly terms."

I like Hamilton's take on the those women crime writers. There is rarely anything cosy about them - least of all about Agatha Christie's Miss Marple books, predicated as they are on the theory that you can learn about every form of human depravity simply by observing life in an English village.

But Kind Hearts and Coronets is not a typical Ealing comedy, even if it's the best of them. Because there is little nastiness in these films: the criminals in The Lavender Hill Mob have our sympathy, while those in The Ladykillers are rendered harmless by their incompetence.

What the films tend to celebrate is the common good and its triumphs over individual ambition. This is seen at its clearest in Davy, a failed star vehicle for Harry Secombe, which is the last and probably the worse Ealing Comedy. In it, Secombe gives up his dream of an opera career to remain with his family's struggling variety act.

But then dreams of escape tended to come to nothing at Ealing, whether Alec Guinness's in The Lavender Hill Mob or those of a whole London district in Passport to Pimlico.

So I don't find the nastiness that Ruby Hamilton says she finds in the Ealing comedies. Am I missing something?


* 'Fetishising' would save one syllable and the rarer 'fetishing' would save two.

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