After her death, a vengeful Louis decides to take the family's dukedom by murdering the eight people ahead of him in the line of succession to the title.

Michael Balcon, the head of Ealing Studios and the producer of Kind Hearts and Coronets, appointed Hamer as director.

His mother, the youngest daughter of the 7th Duke of Chalfont, eloped with an Italian opera singer named Mazzini and was disowned by her family for marrying beneath her station.

Louis's mother brings him up among stories of the history of her family and tells him how, unlike most other peerages, the dukedom of Chalfont can descend through female as well as male heirs.

When Louis leaves school, his mother writes to her kinsman Lord Ascoyne D'Ascoyne, head of a private bank, for assistance in launching her son's career, but is rebuffed.

Louis proposes marriage to Sibella, but she ridicules him, and marries Lionel Holland, a former school friend of her brother who has a rich father.

Upon his later promotion, Louis takes a bachelor flat in St James's, London, for assignations with Sibella, who is unhappy in her marriage to the dull Lionel.

From the window of his flat, Louis then uses a bow and arrow to shoot down the balloon from which the suffragette Lady Agatha D'Ascoyne is dropping leaflets over London.

Lord Ascoyne D'Ascoyne dies from the shock of learning that he has become the ninth duke, sparing Louis from having to murder his kindly employer.

When a reporter tells him that Tit-Bits magazine wishes to publish his memoirs, Louis suddenly remembers that he has left them behind in his cell (thereby providing the authorities with a complete confession).

In 1947 Michael Pertwee, a scriptwriter at Ealing Studios, suggested an adaptation of a 1907 Roy Horniman novel, Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal.

[2] The writer Simon Heffer observes that the plot of the source novel was dark in places—it includes the murder of a child—and differed in several respects from the resulting film.

A major difference was that the main character was the half-Jewish (as opposed to half-Italian) Israel Rank, and Heffer writes that Mazzini's "ruthless using of people (notably women) and his greedy pursuit of position all seem to conform to the stereotype that the anti-semite has of the Jew".

[3] The change from Israel Rank to Louis Mazzini was brought about by the "post-war sensitivity about anti-Semitism", and the moral stance of the films produced by Ealing.

[6] Balcon, who produced the film, chose Robert Hamer as director and warned him that "You are trying to sell that most unsaleable commodity to the British – irony.

[12]Alec Guinness was originally offered only four D'Ascoyne parts, recollecting "I read [the screenplay] on a beach in France, collapsed with laughter on the first page, and didn't even bother to get to the end of the script.

Mozart to winning effect; the elegance, refinement, and inherent propriety" of the pieces used offering both a metaphor of an ordered society and a "counterpoint for murder most foul".

Along with The Man in the White Suit (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955), Kind Hearts and Coronets "unleash[es] transgressive nightmares, fables of subversive, maverick masculine obsession and action, where the repressed and vengeful bubble up to the surface and lead to a resolutions which were only just contained in the moral strictures permissible in (Balcon's) Ealing cinema at the time".

[36] According to Michael Newton, writing for the BFI, Kind Hearts and Coronets has retained the high regard of film historians.

[39][40] Thirteen critics and directors voted for Kind Hearts and Coronets in the 2012 BFI poll of The Greatest Films of All Time, including Terence Davies, Peter Bradshaw and Philip French.

In March 1965, the BBC Home Service broadcast an adaptation by Gilbert Travers-Thomas, with Dennis Price reprising his role as Louis D'Ascoyne Mazzini.

[44] In May 2012, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a sequel to the film called Kind Hearts and Coronets – Like Father, Like Daughter, written by David Spicer.

[45] In September 2004, it was announced that a musical adaption was to be workshopped featuring Raul Esparza, Rebecca Luker, Nancy Anderson and Sean Allan Krill.

[50] In May 2024, A24 announced they would distribute the film Huntington, whose original screenplay was heavily inspired by Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Written and directed by John Patton Ford, and starring Glen Powell, Ed Harris, and Margaret Qualley, production began in June 2024 with principal photography taking place in South Africa.

[54] To mark the film's 70th anniversary in June 2019, a new 4k restoration scanned from the 35 mm nitrate original negative was released by Studiocanal in British cinemas, along with DVD and Blu-Ray versions.