Kind Hearts and Coronets, always worth revisiting

I always notice new details in Kind Hearts and Coronets each time I watch it. This time, it was the question of authenticity - if Louis is our narrator, can anything which he tells us be trusted? There are continuities in the narrative which are more revealing of his priorities than perhaps he intends - a childhood roasting chestnuts round Sibella's nursery fire, a slightly too pious love for his mother, a delusion that he is avenging her by killing his D'Ascoyne relatives rather than reacting to a personal slight. The ridiculing of Lionel Holland and Duke Ethelred, who demonstrate their share of cruelty, but who both demonstrate humanity at the last, at which Louis only shows contempt. The remarkable photography which allows Alec Guinness to appear in the same shot six times in different costumes; and the occasional bleak post-war topicality in this supposedly period piece, such as General Lord Rufus D'Ascoyne hailing the Russian expertise in caviar preparation as he detonates what is in fact a bomb - "not an atom of him was left" records Louis. The USSR had not yet exploded its first atomic bomb when Kind Hearts and Coronets was released, but it's tempting to see the line as playing on western apprehensions.