Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story

Tells of the extraordinary life and talent of Coward who wrote mountains of song, classic plays, screenplays etc. I knew relatively little of Coward other than the characture of a somewhat effete snob with his notoriously razor sharp, dismissive wit and was therefore captivated by the fact he dragged himself from working class poverty to becoming rich, poor and rich again. That he clearly loved his mother and did much for her, that he helped the UK war effort by visiting the U. S. and Australia to drum up support and that friends by the truckload really adored him reflected a good, kind and hard working man. Gay throughout a lifetime where for most part homo sexuality was illegal put additional pressure on him and yet despite this and a few short periods where he fell out a favour, he seems to have lead a remarkable, successful, event filled life - a unique character and an interesting biography.

They don't make them like Noel Coward any more, but perhaps they never did, except for this one man: playright, film director, serious actor, composer and singer of comic songs, and in public, the quintissential Englishman, in spite of the fact he was (surely obviously) gay, which, for most of his life, was illegal in his mother country. Talented he may have been, but this doesn't make his life automatically interesting; and this documentary only partially succeeds in persauding that it was. He seems to have had a high opinion of himself, or at least never confessed to self-doubt; and he achieved most of what he set out to do without too much difficulty. We therefore get 90 minutes testifying to his brilliance. I didn't regret watching, but I didn't feel I learnt too much that I didn't already know. If he had a private self distinct from his public persona, we don't learn much about it.

This is quite a fascinating documentary. Not because Barnaby Thompson has a particularly innovative approach to the subject matter, but because he has managed to use an enormous amount of contemporaneous archive of this enigmatic man, and because he has engaged the charismatic dulcets of Rupert Everett to, rather authentically, read excerpts from his journals that were written, meticulously, throughout his adult life. Born in relative poverty, Coward lived with his parents whilst his mother slaved away running a boarding house. Like his friend in later life, Charlie Chaplin, you get the feeling that this hand-to-mouth upbringing instilled in this largely uneducated man a determination to succeed. From child acting to writing; the USA, Britain and Jamaica all provided creative conduits as he steadily rose to be the best paid writer in the world. Of course, his life wasn't without it's pitfalls and failures but there is a resilience about the man that this film reinforces time and again. His homosexuality is referenced in the narrative from Alan Cumming but unlike Sir John Gielgud, Coward's complete discretion when it came to that aspect of his life was such that there is little, if anything, to put meat on those particular bones. We just know he was gay, he just never let it define his public persona. The variety and quality of the archive is illustrative of the talents - and of the endearing pomposity - of this creative wordsmith and if you are at all interested in the development of music, theatre, cinema and comedy - aspects of the entertainment industry that this man influenced heavily - then you ought to enjoy it.

Very mediocre hagiography that rehashs what we already know and avoids most of the darker stuff. The details of his sex life are obfuscated by a lens that only wants to see long term lovers and the details of quite who he's doing what with when become quite unclear.

I'm not sure why it does the most boring narrative choice of birth to death linear narrative. Better to have started in the 1950s as he fell deeper and deeper out of favour.

But there is some great archive and they allow the clips to play without narrating over everything.

Rupert Everett barely dials in his vocal performance as Coward. They should've used AI like The Andy Warhol Diaries did so successfully.

The choice of Alan Cumming to SHOUT the narration in a fixed present tense "homosexuality is illegal in Britain" was odd and his intonation is all over the place like he's never seen the script before sitting down to read it out. Not sure why they bothered to get Rupert Everett as 'the voice of Noel Coward' when he was simply the voice of Rupert Evertt, effectively a second narrator.

There's little or nothing here that isn't in every one of a hundred biographies. The man himself remains interesting enough for it still be worth watching but don't expect to learn a thing about Coward that you don't already know.