I was a big fan of John Patton Ford’s Emily the Criminal (2022), a compelling drama about working-class life in the United States, which showcased Aubrey Plaza’s remarkable range. And I love the Ealing Studios black comedy masterpiece Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), directed by Robert Hamer and starring Dennis Price as an acidly intelligent young Brit whose mother was cruelly disowned by her wealthy aristocratic family (all members played by Alec Guinness), so he sets out vengefully to inherit the dukedom by murdering them all.
Based on these inducements, I turned out for Ford’s How to Make a Killing, a very loose A24 remake of Kind Hearts and Coronets set in the contemporary US. It’s now playing in theaters and getting very bad reviews and almost no attention from the viewing public.
In How to Make a Killing, there’s still a young working-class man, this time an American named Becket Redfellow, played by Glen Powell. His mother, Mary (Nell Williams), was ruthlessly disowned by the Redfellows, her vile billionaire family, played by a variety of actors, including Ed Harris, Topher Grace, Bill Camp, and Zach Woods.
For some vague reason that overrules his mother having been disowned, Becket is still in line to inherit the family fortune if seven despicable relatives should happen to expire. Plus, his mother’s dying wish is that Becket should find “the right kind of life” for him. And though she ended up a member of the working poor in New Jersey, she raised him as much as possible to appreciate the finer things in life — he’s trained in archery, for example, which comes in handy at a crucial point. So he decides to take matters into his own hands, get creative, and murder them all.
In making films about American characters desperate to get somewhere in life against what seems like overwhelming odds, Ford acknowledges his own personal kinship with them:
After school, I struggled for a long,…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
