This extraordinary comedy distills the aristocratic voice, first reducing it to its two basic constituents - refinement, and the morbidity produced by "an atmosphere of family history and genealogies". These, in turn, are purified, respectively producing an exquisite, pervasive irony, visible nowhere but present everywhere, and a narrative structured around dispossessed aristocrat Louis d'Ascoyne's (Dennis Price) systematic murder of the family members occluding his rightful inheritance. Finally, these purified constituents are recombined, producing Louis' narration, which is one of the greatest in all cinema, and is sufficiently imbued with the entire weight of the lineage that he both needs and despises to become a character in its own right - or, at the very least, a synecdoche for his own narrative presence, which is curiously free of both dialogue and action, as he elliptically recalls his project from an immaculate jail cell. To this end, Hamer ensures that every murder takes place against a backdrop of morbid, aristocratic aestheticism, detailing a panorama of cultured pursuits (boating, photography, tea, brass rubbings, hunting) that constellate around the d'Ascoyne family chapel and, more specifically, its vault, as if to suggest that Louis' project is less murder than an explication of the extent to which his relatives are already dead - a collection of statues - beautifully reinforced both by one particular widow's immediate inclination to transform her husband's mansion into a shrine, and Alec Guinness' serene, self-effacing portrayal of the entire spectrum of Louis' victims.
Billy Stevenson