Alec Guinness

A sublime Ealing comedy, with an Oscar-winning script by T.E.B. Clarke. Alec Guinness is a lowly bank clerk who teams up with hefty Stanley Holloway to pull off an outrageous bullion robbery. Crichton directs with a deft touch and among the usual suspects are henchmen Alfie Bass and Sid James.

Hamer's blade-sharp Ealing comedy is celebrated for Alec Guinness's multifaceted performance as all eight of the doomed D'Ascoynes, but there are other treasures: the suave malice of Dennis Price's draper's assistant-cum-serial killer, Mazzini, who decides to murder his way to the family dukedom; the portrayal of Edwardian England and its snobby mores; and the delicious glee with which the awful upper classes are dispatched (Mazzini would know how to deal with the Bullingdon crowd). A bitter and subversive tale.

The Ladykillers review - the greatest comedy caper

Ealing Studio's two greatest directors, Robert Hamer and Alexander Mackendrick, both made near flawless black comedies on the state of the nation starring Alec Guinness and involving multiple murders, and there is little to choose between the former's Kind Hearts and Coronets and the latter's The Ladykillers, a special edition of which is being released this week to mark its 60th anniversary.

Kind Hearts and Coronets: Telegraph 1949 review

Kind Hearts and Coronets is considered one of the finest British post-war comedies. This Ealing Comedy masterpiece, which was digitally restored in 2011, starred Alec Guinness and was directed by Robert Hamer. The original Daily Telegraph review, published on June 27, 1949, was listed under the section 'Film Notes' and carried the simple byline 'R. P. M. G'. He saw the film in London's Leicester Square. The film's title derives from Tennyson's 1842 poem Lady "Clara Vere de Vere": "Kind hearts are more than coronets/And simple faith than Norman blood."

The Ladykillers was the last of the great Ealing comedies and, almost by default, the dying gasp of a vanishing London; still rationed and rubble-strewn, with steam trains on the tracks and carthorses on the streets.

Shot in 1955 by Alexander Mackendrick, from a script that purportedly came to writer William Rose in a dream, this film charts the misadventures of a gang of thieves who hole up in the home of a guileless widow. Mrs Wilberforce (Katie Johnson) lives in a lopsided house up a King's Cross cul-de-sac, a place that rings to the din of steam whistles and parrot squawks. It becomes the base for a bullion robbery hatched by the oily Professor Marcus (Alec Guinness), who convinces the owner that he and his associates (Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom among them) are actually members of a string quartet. The musicians need a rehearsal space and Mrs Wilberforce is only to happy to oblige, standing on the landing and thrilling to the strains of Boccherini's Minuet (Third Movement) as played on an antique turntable. "You liked that, huh?" mumbles the brutish One Round (Danny Green), who wouldn't know a cello from a hole in the ground.

How does one improve on a film as brisk, pungent and bracing as this? The Coen brothers notoriously tried and failed with their fumbled 2004 remake - a film that seemed to miss (or at least misread) all the elements that made the original so special. "It's an Ealing comedy so there's something very British and genteel about it," Joel Coen sniffed at the time. "That isn't particularly our thing." Genteel? What film was he watching, exactly? The Ladykillers is as black as pitch and as corrosive as battery acid. The crims are picked off one by one; victims of their greed and wickedness while their supposed target bobs - vaguely, innocently - just out of reach.

God, it seems, protects drunks, little children and meddlesome old women with too much time on their hands. So hang on to your handbag and keep the parrot in its cage. Once darkness falls and the goods trains start rolling, this dream of a film can feel suspiciously like a nightmare.

As Alec Guinness did in the 1949 film version of Kind Hearts and Coronets, Alistair McGowan took all the parts of all the Gascoynes (D'Ascoynes in the film) and - with the possible exception of his Lady Edith - did so nimbly and amusingly. Natalie Walter as the ruthless Unity (the Dennis Price part) impressed. It was the script that limped, always a minute behind listener expectation.

David Spicer's Kind Hearts and Coronets - Like Father, Like Daughter, a sequel to the 1949 Ealing comedy in which Alec Guinness played all eight members of the D'Ascoyne family murdered by Louis Mazzini so he can become the 10th Earl of Chalfont, achieved something quite different. This delightful comedy kept the lightness of touch of the original while imbuing the drama with ironic references for a contemporary audience. Spicer's ingenuity in matching the method of despatch to the victim added to the fun.

Natalie Walter was spectacular - droll, manipulative yet likeable, as Unity the illegitimate daughter of Louis, hanged for his litany of dynastic murders. Born with the same sense of entitlement, Unity set about murdering her father's wife, Lady Edith Gascoyne and five of her six children, the entire family played in an astonishing vaudevillian style by Alistair McGowan, the personality and fate of each somehow embodied in phonics and inflections.

Tricky though the film Kind Hearts and Coronets must have been for the many-roled Alec Guinness, it was almost certainly a doddle compared with Alistair McGowan's feat of portraying seven members of the Gascoyne family by voice alone, in yesterday's sequel. That there was never any doubt as to who was supposed to be whom was a tribute to his rightly lauded mimetic powers.

Kind Hearts and Coronets: Like Father, Like Daughter saw Unity Holland (daughter of the original film's killer, played by Dennis Price) seeking her rightful inheritance by knocking off the six sons of Lady Edith Gascoyne. It provided a lovely, featherlight way to while away an hour, nicely written by David Spicer, with Natalie Walter as the engagingly amoral Unity. When war breaks out, she records: "I offered to do my bit for King and country, but - rather shortsightedly in my case - women were deemed incapable of killing."

You don't have to have seen the classic 1949 film of Kind Hearts and Coronets (with Dennis Price as the villainous Louis Mazzini murdering his way through all the D'Ascoynes, each one played by Alec Guinness, for the family fortune) to enjoy David Spicer's radio sequel.

Time has rolled on, we're in the 20th century. Unity Holland (Natalie Walter) is up against many other claimants to the earldom, each played by clever Alistair McGowan and all of them ruthless.

Graham Linehan: A time to kill

Why is one of the kings of TV sitcom writing dipping his feet into commercial theatre with The Ladykillers? A combination of middle age, The 39 Steps and Alec Guinness' comic timing, says Graham Linehan...