Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)

Director Robert Hamer

Perhaps the most perfect of all the Golden-Age Ealing comedies, Kind Hearts and Coronets famously featured Alec Guinness in eight different roles as the unsuspecting members of the aristocratic D’Ascoyne family – bumped off one by one by the scheming, outcast cousin of the family: Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price).

The film features stunning and inventive cinematography by Douglas Slocombe, and a groundbreaking first-person narrative that, legend has it, inspired Scorsese to make use of the same device in Goodfellas.

"The Ealing genre reached utter perfection with this superb black comedy of manners about the most elegant serial killer in history" - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian