(2024, 95 min)
Country: United Kingdom
Director: Barnaby Thompson
Studio: Greenwich Entertainment
Language: English
SYNOPSIS: If Noël Coward, the 20th century writer of over 60 plays, composer of over 500 songs, headliner of his own Las Vegas act, and even a British spy, were alive today, he would probably be a reality television star or social media influencer. He was a premier wit and a sparkling raconteur, making him a multimedia mainstay before multimedia was even a word. He was also a closeted gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Britain, and he spent his life constructing and maintaining a public persona far removed from his childhood experience./P>
Telling the story of someone so impossible to know yet impossible to dislike is the main challenge facing director Barnaby Thompson in his documentary, Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story. Thompson’s solution primarily involves speed; this is a fast-moving, fact-packed reminder of Coward’s singular talent and spiky humor. While it edges towards hagiography and is visually rather pedestrian, it still performs the noble service of reclaiming Noël Coward from the mists of history
REVIEW:
In telling Coward’s fascinating story, Thompson drags out the customary assortment of television appearances, personal photos, and sound bites from vintage storytellers, while adding passages from Coward’s writings read by Rupert Everett. If he relies too heavily on only two television interviews, both conducted later in Coward's life, he compensates by honestly and accurately portraying Coward as someone whose "greatest creation" was the front he presented to the world.
Coward was born in a London suburb in 1899 and grew up in poverty. His father was a piano salesman and when he lost that job, his mother worked “like a slave” at a boardinghouse. Noël dropped out of school at age nine and in 1910 answered an ad in the Daily Mail for a theater production looking for an “attractive, talented, and handsome boy.” By 1920 he’d made a name for himself in West End theater productions and was his family’s main breadwinner with the goal of becoming rich enough to “get mother out of that damned kitchen forever.”
Barnaby’s film gains contemporary relevance as Coward — who suffered from a childhood stutter — begins to transform himself into a posh English gentleman with an ever-so clipped accent. This crafting of his new self began with his first hit play, the scandalous 1924 piece, The Vortex. He not only wrote it, but he also starred as a sophisticated playboy, a role he would adopt off-stage for the rest of his life.
When The Vortex — with its unique blend of dry British wit and American comic pacing — opened in New York, it earned rave reviews and allowed Coward to fulfill his long-held dream of seeing his name in lights on Broadway. Much like today’s reality stars, he embraced the “pleasurable trappings” of success, making himself available to any radio show, magazine or gossip columnist who needed a pithy quote from a charming Brit smoking a long cigarette and wearing a boutonničre. But he had the talent to back it up; during a two-year span, the prolific Coward would mount ten shows on Broadway and in London. By age 30, he was the highest paid writer in the world, proving the point by driving a Rolls-Royce
Many of his classic plays were adapted into films; Design for Living was made into a 1933 comedy directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch, while the brilliant 1945 big screen versions of Blithe Spirit and Brief Encounter (based on Coward's play Still Life) were helmed by David Lean. Coward wasn’t particularly happy with any of the adaptations, but clips from Coward’s films, including ones he appeared in (like 1959's Our Man in Havana and 1969's The Italian Job), help get the doc up on its feet and don't rely on vintage elements. (One film never makes it onto Coward’s CV; he famously turned down the role of the title villain in the first James Bond adventure, Dr. No).
Coward’s life took so many detours and was tinged with such secret sadness that Mad About the Boy — narrated by Alan Cumming — is constantly surprising and engaging. No more so than upon learning that Coward was a spy for the British during World War II. Initially he was sent to Paris to feed misinformation to the Germans. Later — calling himself the “perfect silly ass” — he was asked to use his fame to influence U.S. opinion in favor of helping Britain’s war effort.
The tragic downside was that his clandestine service made the Brits think he was traipsing around America while soldiers were dying on the battlefield and his career took a cruel nosedive. But ever the master of reinvention, Coward erases his Ł20,000 debt by developing a cabaret show that opens in London before making a successful run in Las Vegas. He immediately followed that with a patriotic British film, working with David Lean to create a rousing piece of propaganda to help support the war effort at home.
Coward, as they say, contained multitudes, and Barnaby tries mightily to cover a lot of ground while still letting his 97-minute film breathe. He manages to wedge in Coward’s successful recording career, which launched on the back of the growing popularity of sheet music and phonographic records. His musical accomplishments were all the more remarkable because Coward could neither read nor write music. But songwriting allowed him to express romantic thoughts in a way he couldn’t in public life. Indeed, for all his achievements, Coward’s successes will always be tinged with the knowledge that even after homosexuality was made legal in Britain in 1967, he remained in the closet until his death in 1973.
Barnaby foregrounds the two main contradictions in Coward’s life, ones that poverty and government regulation created, which ultimately absolves the film from its inability to be more than a briskly-paced, if fairly detailed, overview of Coward’s life. “It’s all a question of masks, really,” Coward says. "We all wear them as a form of protection. Modern life forces us to.” Mad About the Boy convinces us that very few have worn their mask as tightly — and achieved such fame despite having worn it — as Noël Coward.
--Review By Mark Keizer, Movieweb (https://www.movieweb.com/)