On Loca­tion: The Nor­man cas­tle from Kind Hearts and Coronets

It’s per­haps unusu­al for a British com­e­dy to open with the hor­ri­fy­ing yet banal logis­tics of a state hang­ing. Yet, as with so many Eal­ing come­dies, Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coro­nets has a streak of dark­ness and is eas­i­ly one of the studio’s most mor­bid films. Based on the nov­el by Roy Horn­i­man, the film plays fast and loose with mur­der as a whole fam­i­ly, famous­ly realised sole­ly by the per­for­mances of Alec Guin­ness, are despatched one by one by Den­nis Price’s smooth talk­ing killer, Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini.

Hamer uses a typ­i­cal Eal­ing blend of atmos­pher­ic stu­dios and ground­ed real loca­tions to cap­ture a pic­ture-post­card vision of sub­ur­ban Lon­don and beyond. But the heart of the nar­ra­tive is actu­al­ly much fur­ther out of the cap­i­tal and is ulti­mate­ly a build­ing impor­tant enough to con­sid­er worth killing a whole fam­i­ly for.

The film fol­lows the dev­il­ish life of Louis, a suave cad who is will­ing to com­mit par­ri­cide on the jour­ney towards claim­ing an inher­i­tance he has been denied. With his moth­er (Audrey Fildes) hav­ing eloped and mar­ried for love rather than posi­tion, her aris­to­crat­ic fam­i­ly dis­owned her, forc­ing her to move from her exten­sive fam­i­ly cas­tle, Chal­font, to the com­mon sub­ur­bia of south London.

Louis slow­ly works his way back into the fam­i­ly, intend­ing to remove all of those ahead of him in line to the vast, his­toric prop­er­ty. But, with his love life inter­min­gled with the woman he is forced to lodge with (Joan Green­wood) and the soon-to-be wid­ow of one of the younger D’Ascoynes (Valerie Hob­son), will he reach his goal with­out detec­tion from the police?

The hous­es of Hamer’s film are piv­otal to the nar­ra­tive and rep­re­sent the social sit­u­a­tions and posi­tions that dri­ve Louis onwards with his cun­ning, mur­der­ous plot. In fact, the loca­tions and their dif­fer­ences are the very rea­son for Louis’ killing, some­thing that is deeply iron­ic con­sid­er­ing the like­li­hood of the mod­ern rise in val­ue of the Lon­don prop­er­ties in par­tic­u­lar. Chal­font itself is the goal of the film and is shown as an idyl­lic, Xanadu-like realm that Louis can only enter as a tourist on his first visit.

He keeps a pic­ture of it on the wall of his more hum­ble abode, its back­ing adorned with a detailed fam­i­ly tree of every­one he must elim­i­nate. He cross­es each mem­ber out as he pol­ish­es them off one by one. In some ways, the fam­i­ly tree rep­re­sents a map and a route to the cas­tle which the char­ac­ter seeks to fol­low, the end being a posi­tion of pow­er, mon­ey and even one of revenge tak­en in regards to the treat­ment of his mother.

Chal­font Cas­tle is actu­al­ly Leeds Cas­tle in Maid­stone, Kent. A cas­tle was built on the site in 1119 and was even­tu­al­ly the home ordained for Cather­ine of Aragon to live in by Hen­ry VIII. Due to being pre­served by the pri­vate firm that now runs it, lit­tle has changed since it was seen var­i­ous­ly in the film, though the cas­tle was more frosty on my vis­it. I trav­elled to Holling­bourne from Lon­don and walked from the sta­tion to the cas­tle through the wind­ing Kent roads, them­selves like some­thing from an Eal­ing film. I want­ed to shoot the pho­to­graph of today from the side of the cas­tle as this is the view seen most often in the film and is the one which Louis keeps a pic­ture of on his wall.

The view is real­ly his con­tin­ued inspi­ra­tion for car­ry­ing out the killings so car­ries a qui­et­ly pow­er­ful res­o­nance. His final prop­er killing is also in the grounds of this loca­tion, trap­ping the penul­ti­mate Ascoyne D’Ascoyne in a man trap and shoot­ing him in cold blood; the shock death then killing the last obsta­cle to his inher­i­tance of every­thing the fam­i­ly deprived him of.

After vis­it­ing the cas­tle, I want­ed to find out about the oth­er hous­es that Louis finds him­self in. Though Hamer makes great pains to set Louis’ first hous­es in Clapham, they are in fact near­er the stu­dios of Eal­ing in Acton. The main town­house that he even­tu­al­ly found him­self liv­ing in as an adult has since been knocked down and replaced by an ugly new build.

But the very first house of Louis’ moth­er still stands on Wood­hurst Road. The road can be seen in the film at a bright time of the year, as Louis’ moth­er posts anoth­er failed beg­ging let­ter to her fam­i­ly. Con­sid­er­ing this is meant to be a place rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a loss of sta­tus, it also reveals the lev­el of class that the nar­ra­tive is deal­ing with, the area being as nice a piece of Lon­don sub­ur­bia as can be.

The strength of Ealing’s films lay in their bal­ance of choco­late box British eccen­tric­i­ty and a more mor­bid form of dra­ma, acknowl­edg­ing both traits in our gen­er­al nation­al char­ac­ter. The studio’s films often do this by putting allur­ing yet evil char­ac­ters in more typ­i­cal­ly roman­tic loca­tions. Kind Hearts and Coro­nets is a per­fect embod­i­ment of this, where the leafy roads of sub­ur­bia and the his­toric cas­tles of the Home Coun­ties become the sur­pris­ing back­drop for some qui­et­ly bru­tal and dis­tinct­ly unchar­ac­ter­is­tic violence.

The true irony of the film is that all of this is hap­pen­ing due to a moth­er who ​“mar­ried for love instead of for rank or mon­ey or land” and because of a fam­i­ly who found such Lon­don sub­ur­bia ulti­mate­ly dis­taste­ful in com­par­i­son to their vast castle.