How to Make a Murder Review – One Man’s Bloody Quest for His Inheritance Is So Far Remake | film

RThe making of Robert Hammer’s 1949 British classic Kind Hearts and Coronets – Ealing Studios’ greatest comedy, and in my feverish opinion the greatest film ever made – required the audacity of Cecilia Jimenez, the Spanish amateur artist who “restored” a painting of Christ and left him looking like a gibbon. This new version isn’t actually quite as mysterious as it could have been. But as with the uneasy version of Ealing’s Coen brothers’ The Ladykillers, or Todd Phillips’s austere remake of Hammer’s School for Scoundrels, the question is: why do it at all, especially when the new American situation means losing the all-important element of class consciousness and class shame?

The original film starred Dennis Price as Lewis, an assistant to an Edwardian cloth merchant who is a distant heir to a dukedom, and who lives in abject poverty because his late mother was cruelly rejected by her overbearing family for marrying under her — for love, in fact. Louis vengefully sets out to kill all the family members who stand between him and the crown – all expertly played by Alec Guinness, a Frigoli nightmare in which all of Louis’ enemies are the same eponymous monster. Joan Greenwood plays Sibylla, the cynical young girl whose arrogant cruelty sets off Lewis’ plan, and Valerie Hobson plays Edith, the gentle widow of one of his victims with whom he falls in love.

This John Patton Ford-directed remake of the Aubrey Plaza thriller Emily moves the action to present-day United States, with Glen Powell playing a young man with the strange name of Beckett Redfellow, who is excluded from the clan and turns to serial killing on his way to taking control of the family estate. Margaret Qualley is the attractive Sibylla and Jessica Henwick is Beckett’s true love. The film stays very close to the plot of the original, but the victims are poorly represented by different people. Perhaps no actor has dared to take on Guinness’s many amazing roles. (Who has tried? Benedict Cumberbatch? Andrew Scott? Eddie Redmayne? Jonathan Bailey?)

Powell himself, while game enough, is too bland and has nothing to match Price’s cold elegance or the seething force of his hurt feelings, and the resulting film never comes close to the original’s brilliant satire of male professionalism. A pale imitation.