A matter of some delicacy

I can remember precisely where I was when I first saw the film The Lavender Hill Mob. But my memories of Kind Hearts and Coronets are hazier. I was a good deal younger, that's for sure - perhaps in my early teens.

I could remember that it was quite unlike any other film I'd ever seen.  Here was something aloof and sophisticated and yet very dark, as the "hero" Louis Mazzini calmly set about killing off anyone who stood between him and a dukedom. I could remember what everyone else remembers: the novelty of Alec Guinness playing a multitude of doomed cameos. And the ending had also remained with me, as neat and elegant as a satisfying chess pin.

So, watching it again after all these years - what else?

A sharp twinge of sexual excitement when Joan Greenwood appears.  Over the last 35 years or so, I must have harboured a long suppressed lusting for the shameless Sibella.

What really struck me, though, was the smartness of the script. I could watch this film several times over and never tire of its wit.

I'm easily pleased though. In the right context, a simple phrase like I had fortunately learnt to swim at the Clapham Municipal Baths is enough to set me off.

Here the "humour" is cruelly detached:
The advent of twin sons to the duke was a terrible blow.
Fortunately an epidemic of diptheria restored the status quo almost immediately.

Here we find Mazzini, who is after all half-Italian, reflecting that revenge is the dish which people of taste prefer to eat cold, beating The Godfather to it by over 20 years.

And so on, and so on.

Where did my love of film go? In my formative years I was lucky enough to have a small black and white portable television in my bedroom.  And that's where I'd go to watch whatever was on, alone, including all those classics of British cinema, faithfully screened by the BBC. And I'm glad that I did.

"It is a colloquial rendering of course." The Reverend Lord Henry D'Ascoyne,
a little displeased by his guest's dubious demonstration of the Matabele language