Comedy Movie Churches: Kind Hearts and Coronets

Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
I’ve preached some boring sermons through the years, but fortunately, no one has threatened my life because of them. In the 1949 comedy, Kind Hearts and Coronets, the Parson was not so fortunate. (To be fair, the killer was already planning to murder the Reverend Lord Henry D’Ascoyne. The boring sermon just “moved him up the list.”) Still, the worst I’ve faced for being dull in the pulpit is a little snoring.

Kind Hearts and Coronets was produced at Ealing Studios, a company that made quite a number of excellent comedies in postwar Britain. The film tells the story of Louis D’Ascoyne Mazzini (Dennis Price), the son of an aristocrat who was disowned by her family when she married an Italian opera singer. When his mother dies, Louis asks the D’Ascoynes if his mother can be buried in the family crypt, according to her wishes. When they refuse, he vows revenge.

He plans to kill off every D’Ascoyne in the line of ahead of him until he takes the inherited title of Tenth Duke of Chalfont. (It should be noted that every member of the D’Ascoyne line -- except Louis and his mother -- is played by Sir Alec Guinness.)

Of course, Dennis knew murder was wrong. He was educated in a British Public School (which would be a private school in the US) where he was taught the Ten Commandments. He knew the Sixth Commandment about not killing well enough, but he grew up to break it (along with the Seventh Commandment).

Eight aristocrats that stand in between Louis and Dukedom, and he first dispatches Ascoyne D’Ascoyne, a man who got Louis fired from his job at a department store. Next, he goes after Henry D’Ascoyne. Louis had befriended Henry (“It’s so hard to kill people with whom one is not on friendly terms”), and so he attends his funeral. The service is conducted by another D’Ascoyne named Henry, the Reverend Lord Henry D’Ascoyne.

Louis describes the sermon commemorating the other Henry as “interminable nonsense.” After opening with the "seasonal" passage from Ecclesiastes 3, he moves on to commemorate Henry.  In the eulogy, the Parson said, “The life cut short was one rich in achievement and promise of service to humanity.” Louis knew that Henry's greatest goal was to sneak a drink while hiding from his wife -- not serving humanity.

Louis believes Henry is part of the English tradition of sending the dimmest member of the family to serve in the clergy (an idea often found in English novels). Louis finds him such a bore, he decides to move the Parson up to number three on his kill list.

So Louis takes on the “garb and character” of a visiting bishop and goes to see the Reverend D’Ascoyne, claiming to be making a collection of brass rubbings in country churches. When Henry greets Louis with, “Good evening, my Lord,” Louis is quite shocked to be addressed by his ecclesiastical title.

Henry happily gives Louis a tour of the church, speaking nonsense, “Have you noticed our cheristry? The corbels are very fine. You will note our chantry displays the crocketed and final ogee, which marks it as early perpendicular. The bosses to the pendant are typical. And I always say my west window has all the exuberance of Chaucer, without any of the crudities of his period.” Some of these are real architectural terms, but Henry seems to have no idea what they mean.

But the thing Parson Henry takes the most “pride” in, is the D’Ascoyne family crypt. “Every member of the family is buried in the vault,” he says, though Louis’ mother was not buried there. “The dead, as it were, keeping watch over the living.”

Quite notably absent in his tour is any mention of God, let alone Jesus.

Henry invites “the Bishop” to dinner. Louis notes that, “Fortunately, he was not one of those clerics who brings his vocation into his private life.” Henry luxuriates in wine and cigars, though his doctor advised him against both. But it gives Louis a good opportunity to put poison in Henry’s wine.

Yeah, murder is bad. But one doesn’t feel that the church will suffer greatly from the loss of the Reverend Lord Henry D’Ascoyne. Therefore, we are giving the Rev. a rather low Movie Churches rating of Two Steeples.

(And if you feel compelled to watch more black and white black comedies from the forties about serial killings, might I suggest 1944’s Arsenic and Old Lace. Directed by Frank Capra, the film has a minister, the Reverend Harper (who's also Cary Grant’s father-in-law). He doesn’t have much screen time, but he if he did, he would be likely to get a higher Steeple rating than Rev. Henry.)

Science & Church: The Theory of Everything (2014)

There's not much church in this docudrama of the life of Stephen Hawking, and one assumes that's would be fine with him. When Stephen (played by Eddie Redmayne for an Oscar win) met Jane, who is to be his first wife, he told her, "I'm a cosmologist. That's religion for intelligent people." (You know, as opposed to idiots like Augustine, Aquinas, and Newton who held to orthodox Christianity.)

Jane replied, "I'm C.of E. [Church of England]"

"I suppose someone has to be," Stephen responded.

He told Jane that he can't allow his calculations to be muddled by belief in a supernatural creator, although physicists like William Henry Bragg seemed to be able to do maths well enough to get a Nobel Prize in spite of preaching in the Anglican Church on the weekends. Ernan McMullin managed to find room in his life for the "religion" of cosmology as a Roman Catholic priest. Charles Hard Townes was another Nobel Prize winner for physics who found room on his shelf for the Templeton Prize for religious achievement.

Anyway, back to the meager appearances of the church in this film. When Stephen asked Jane on a croquet date on Sunday morning, she replied, "I'm busy Sunday morning."

"Oh, yes, Him," Stephen replied. We then see Stephen waiting for her to leave church on Sunday.

If you have any acquaintance with the life of Hawking (and why would you watch this film without it?) you know he has battled Lou Gehrig's Disease for the majority of his adult life. In spite of his ailment, Stephen and Jane had three children. In the film, we see photos of the family after their third child's christening at an Anglican Church. Apparently, all three of his children were christened. One would assume this was by Jane's choice.

Not surprisingly, the film portrayed Jane facing many challenges in life due to her husband's illness, academic pursuits, and initial meager income. She went to her mother for advice on finding more in life. When her mother told her she should join the church choir, Jane responded, "That's the most English thing I have ever heard."

But she joined the choir. We see her enter a lovely Anglican church with beautiful stained glass but wooden chairs in place of pews. The choir director, Jonathan Jones, accepted Jane as a music student and soon became a family friend, discussing science and religion with Stephen, who assured him that physics will bring about the death of God (which reminded me of something Mark Twain said about great exaggeration).

Eventually, Stephen took a lover and forsok Jane, so Jane returned to her church and, eventually, the arms of Jonathan. I can't help but wonder if the church's clergy was at all concerned about the behavior of its musical staff.

The little we see of the church in the film doesn't seem to merit the disparaging remarks Hawking made, so we're giving it Two Steeples.  

Heavens Above! (1963)

 Peter Sellers was a great comic chameleon. He might be an idiot detective (The Pink Panther series), an idiot Indian movie star (The Party) or an idiot spy (Casino Royale) but he really became that idiot. He wasn't always an idiot, but he was always someone else; in Dr. Strangelove he was three someones (President, army captain, and mad scientist). In Heavens Above!, he wasn't just imitating a Vicar, he was imitating a Vicar who was trying to imitate Christ.

During the fifties and sixties there were many great little screwball comedies and satires, from The Lavender Hill Mob to The Man in the White Suit to The Ladykillers to The Mouse That Roared. But this one's a little different. It's based on an idea by Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the great Christian thinkers of the twentieth century.

Sellers plays the Reverend John Smallwood not as an idiot, but as Christ's fool. A clerical error brings him from serving in a prison (where the warden complains that he cares more about the prisoners than the people in authority who could do him some good) to the small town of Orbiston Parva. By tradition, the Vicar of Trinity Anglican Church has been at the beck and call of the Despard family because of their great wealth. Smallwood has other priorities.

The Despards are looking for very specific qualities in a pastor. He shouldn't be poor, because "a poor parson's an embarrassment." He shouldn't drink too much, of course, but a teetotaler makes people uncomfortable. He should be married even if the Apostle Paul was not ("Paul was a queer man"). The Bishop meant to send a man named Smallwood who fit these qualifications nicely, but a secretary pulls the wrong Smallwood from the card catalogue (for our younger readers, a "card catalog" is... oh, never mind).

Shortly after arriving in town, Smallwood goes door to door asking people about their faith. Most say that "religion is all right in its place, but you can't let it interfere with your ordinary life." A number of people come to hear Smallwood's first sermon, and they don't like what they hear. He began by saying, "I'm not a good Christian, but I'm trying to be. If we want to join Jesus' club, we need to do as He told us, live as He showed us. This town is full of people who call themselves Christians, but I haven't seen enough Christians to feed one decent lion." The Despards are not pleased with this sermon.

The Despards are also not pleased when he appoints a black rubbish man as his warden and invites poor people to live with him in his vicarage ("I didn't know what to do with all this space.") Lady Despard (Isabel Jeans) brings Smallwood to her home for a talking to, but Smallwood takes her to the Gospels and the story of the Rich Young Ruler. She's troubled by the difficulty of the rich entering the Kingdom of Heaven (later in the film the Bishop tries to assure her that we have "modern ways of interrupting that passage").

Lady Despard decides to give to the poor, and that's where the real trouble begins. She confers with Smallwood, and they decide to make food free to all who ask in the town. This does not please the local merchants and grocers, and people take advantage of the situation. Sadly, though they know the passage about giving to the poor, they neglect the wisdom in Paul's second letter to the Thessalonians ,  "If a man will not work, he shall not eat."

Trouble also comes in the form of Smallwood's preaching about the products of the local factory. He states that satisfaction can't come from material goods but only from God. That, along with Lady Despard selling her stock in the factory, leads to economic chaos for the town.

When people try to follow Christ, things don't always turn out swell. Sin and the Devil will still spread discontent and misery, but we must try to follow Christ's call nonetheless. Which is why I'm giving the Vicar and the church in this quite funny film Three Steeples.