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"It's clear that you are insane." Studiocanal UK has debuted a trailer for the 70th anniversary re-release of classic British film Kind Hearts and Coronets, which originally premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1949. The film comes from the "Golden-Age of Ealing comedies", and is one of those amusing British crime comedies about Dukes and Duchesses and other royalty. A distant poor relative of the Duke of D'Ascoyne, named Louis Mazzini, plots to inherit the title by murdering the eight other heirs – all famously played by Alec Guinness – who stand ahead of him in the line of succession. Louis employs a variety of imaginative murder techniques in order to achieve his aim, and gradually his goal seems to be moving towards his grasp. The cast includes Dennis Price, Joan Greenwood, Valerie Hobson, and Audrey Fildes. The film has been restored in pristine 4K, and will be re-released to UK cinemas...

Alec Guinness: Before Obi-Wan Kenobi, there were the eight D’Ascoyne family members (photo: Alec Guiness, Dennis Price in ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’) (See previous post: “Alec Guinness Movies: Pre-Star Wars Career.”) TCM won’t be showing The Bridge on the River Kwai on Alec Guinness day, though obviously not because the cable network programmers believe that one four-hour David Lean epic per day should be enough. After all, prior to Lawrence of Arabia TCM will be presenting the three-and-a-half-hour-long Doctor Zhivago (1965), a great-looking but never-ending romantic drama in which Guinness — quite poorly — plays a Kgb official. He’s slightly less miscast as a mere Englishman — one much too young for the then 32-year-old actor — in Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), a movie that fully belongs to boy-loving (in a chaste, fatherly manner) fugitive Finlay Currie. And finally, make sure to watch Robert Hamer’s dark comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets...