The govt official is a veteran hangman. He's been hanging convicted criminals for eons. But this time he's in a fix, he ponders and then ponders some more, at last askes the jailer, "Tomorrow morning when I'll take the prisoner to the gallows, bind his hands, put a cover over his head, how do I address him?" The jailer replies, "Your grace."
Even with so many years of experience under his belt, the govt official never hanged a Duke! Never even heard about hanging a Duke!
Duke Louis D'Ascoyne Mazzini is in jail, convicted of murder. Tomorrow he'll be hanged at the gallows. In his cell, the duke starts writing his memoir. We see the events that took place hitherto through his writing. His mother was a D'Ascoyne of the Chalfont dukedom. She fell in love with a commoner and married him. As a result the Chalfont family disowned her and severed any ties with her. She didn't even get to be buried at the family graveyard after her death. Louis saw this as a grave injustice to his mother. For that, and for some of the misfortunes that came along his ways from time to time—he blamed the duke family. He planned to take his revenge on his maternal family. To inherit the dukedom, he planned to kill every single heir to the throne who were before him in the line of succession.
Louis was successful, that bit is stated from the start. Otherwise, he wouldn't be the duke waiting to be hanged in the first place. And the story of the film is a revenge narrative, wrapped up in layers of dark comedy. If it wasn't dark comedy, I suspect it would be a mindless gruesome gore thriller at best.
The film explored and made satire of class distinction and anti-liberal prejudices of that time.
Louis is the protagonist and the antagonist at the same time and we can explore the character and his thoughts and psyche. He has set a number of goals for him and we see him following them intimately. His life is driven by these goals. As a person he's cunning, nihilist and resentful. Yet he can made distinction of good from evil. He wants companionship. He feels empathy. In a way, Louis is a baby that never grew out of the cradle of his mother's history.
The blackest comedy lies in his yearning heart. Louis comes across two women—both are of exceptional beauty and he's attracted to both of them. However, one of them is cunning and vindictive like him. As if she's the female version of him. The other one is the personification of simplicity and morality. Louis is faced with a dilemma, he has to choose any of them. Whomever he choose, he looses the other and their traits.
D'Ascoyne have 9 heirs and all of those characters were played by a single actor — Sir Alec Guinness. Male, female, young, old all kinds. The features that can distinct one character from the other are their gaits, makeup and speech patterns. It is a great feat and a marvelous achievement for Sir Guinness to be able to successfully portray so many characters in a single film all by himself. However, he didn't receive much commendation for it. Contemporary critics can be clueless sometimes!
The irony is, Sir Guinness is most famous for his portrayal of Obi-wan Kenobi in Star Wars franchise. But he was not a fan of that role. For some reason, that doesn't surprise me at all.