Upon Rewatching Kind Hearts and Coronets

The other day I was at home in the afternoon and caught "Kind Hearts and Coronets" on TV. Probably the first time I'd seen it in twenty or thirty years, and even then I missed the beginning. It was a strange, quite extreme experience. I have a half-memory of seeing the film many times when I was younger - say from the age of seven to fifteen - on TVs at home or at my Nan's. I found I not only remembered a great deal of the dialogue over that seeming gulf of time (which is perhaps not so surprising, given that it is highly arch and mannered, with carefully constructed well-turned phrases and balanced sentences), but that I also recalled almost every feature of set, costume, walk and gesture. I found, and still find a few days later, this a strange and and excessive experience. The cool, tempered, black-and-white film playing out at its own pace, unfurling its narrative, which I found I knew fully in advance. I felt somehow gripped by it, unable to look away.

I still can't fully explain this, except by reference to the lenght of time since I used to watch it a lot, and hence the degree to which it managed to catch me by surprise. Also, it has a very beguiling developing storyline, with few repeated or recuperated scenes. Indeed, those settings which do recur (eg those associated with Louis's office life) tend to blur together, and I don't recall them well at all. But the great single scenes (the murders, Sibella's attempt to blackmail Louis, the hangman's poetry reading for example) clearly stay in the mind for a considerable period.

Is this also related also to the mannered, Edwardian style? Hard to say. Other films I watched at the same time (eg "The Lavender Hill Mob", "633 Squadron", "Zulu" and "The Titfield Thunderbolt" come to mind) seem, when I think of them, to have left no similar effect. But now I think about it one other film from that period in my life has remained: "A Matter of Life and Death". I remember seeing that after some time, and again the scenes were instantly familiar to me, the infinite staircase, the frozen table tennis match and the American jury for example. Yet even that great film doesn't have quite the sense of being fully recalled, when I think about it, that "Kind Hearts..." does.