Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story

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.