The Scoundrel (1935 film)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
"The newspapers and magazines where Hollywood's future screenwriters worked were often saturated with the belated, cosmopolitan decadence that James Huneker introduced to America. The genealogy of decadence we are tracing here runs from literary Europe in the 1890s to journalistic America in the 1920s to the Hollywood of the 1930s. This cultural transaction (Huysmans to Huneker to Hecht to Hollywood) is instanced by The Scoundrel, a film staring Noel Coward that Hecht wrote and directed in 1935."--Decadence and the Making of Modernism (1995) by David Weir |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
The Scoundrel is a 1935 drama film directed by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and starring Noël Coward, Julie Haydon, Stanley Ridges, Rosita Moreno and Lionel Stander. It was Coward's film debut, aside from a bit role in a silent film. It deals with supernatural redemption in a way rather similar to Ferenc Molnár's Liliom, and drew inspiration from the life of publisher Horace Liveright, who had died in September 1933.
Plot
Anthony Mallare (Noël Coward) is a publisher who (it appears) wishes to ruin the life of every person he comes in contact with. Every sentence he says is like a poisoned dart aimed for the greatest damage, and delivered in cold lifeless tones. He is under no illusion regarding his own personality, remarking to his staff at large that he has found the perfect woman—one as empty as he is: "I must marry her ... it would be like two empty paper bags belabouring one another". He finally manages to completely destroy the career and life of an aspiring young author (Stanley Ridges) and his girlfriend (Julie Haydon), who curses him with the hope that he will die friendless. Shortly afterwards he is killed when his plane crashes into the ocean—Haydon's character, upon hearing of the tragedy, remarks, "I've just found out there IS a God!"
Faced with the prospect of damnation he is allowed to go back to earth to find one person who will mourn for him—which person turns out to be Haydon. (Those around him are astonished to see him apparently alive and back at work, but gradually become aware that something supernatural is afoot.)
Cast
- Noël Coward as Anthony Mallare
- Julie Haydon as Cora Moore
- Stanley Ridges as Paul Decker
- Martha Sleeper as Julia Vivian
- Ernest Cossart as Jimmy Clay
- Rosita Moreno as Carlotta
- Eduardo Ciannelli as Maurice Stern
- Lionel Stander as Rothenstien
- O. Z. Whitehead as Calhoun
- Harry Davenport as Slezack
- Burgess Meredith as Bum (uncredited)
