Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story
Barnaby Thompson celebrates the career of ‘The Master,’ the wit, raconteur, playwright, movie star and singer with the impeccable vowels.
The arrival of this film feels mistimed although one can well understand why it appears now. Noël Coward was born in 1899 and his life and work is being celebrated in various forms including new stagings of his work under the umbrella title of ‘Coward 125’ leading up to the anniversary in 2024. Although The Master, as he was known, is still famous, there may well be a younger generation for whom a resumé of his many achievements will be informative while the old clips seen here – from films, interviews, cabaret performances and even old home movies – will be a welcome reminder of past pleasures for those viewers who are older.
However, while the filmmaker here, Barnaby Thompson, has plenty of archive material that can be brought into service, he is making his film at a time when most of those who were once close to Coward have themselves died (after all it is fifty years since his own death). Watching Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story (hardly the most appropriate title in that it could unintentionally be mistaken as hinting at gay paedophilia) one misses fresh footage, the sense of people expressing their feelings about Coward as they look back in a way that could bring everything to life again. Its absence also means that Coward’s story comes across in a jumble of voices since the telling of it is split between Alan Cumming acting as narrator, Rupert Everett quoting Coward’s own words (most memorably diary extracts) and Coward himself heard in many a filmed interview.
Thompson is new to documentary films but shows no special flair for this kind of work: Mad About the Boy feels like a routine scissors-and-paste job relying as it does exclusively on archive be that in black and white or in colour. In this day and age, the film can be frank about Coward’s homosexuality: it references his relationships with Jack Wilson and Alan Webb for example. It also brings in two significant voices, his long-term companion Graham Payn and his secretary Cole Lesley, but these are inevitably old comments and the only real insights into Coward’s life as a gay man stem from his private thoughts in his diaries. As for the film extracts incorporated, many are highly familiar ranging from In Which We Serve to The Italian Job, but there are also more novel moments represented such as Coward’s TV specials with Mary Martin and his appearance at the Royal Court Theatre in a special one-day presentation of Arnold Wesker’s play The Kitchen. Furthermore, I was interested to discover that Coward himself participated in a TV movie version of Blithe Spirit in 1956 appearing alongside Claudette Colbert and Lauren Bacall. It will also be news to many that Coward turned down an offer to play the villain in Dr. No and that Sinatra’s professed admiration added to the impact of Coward’s first cabaret shows in Las Vegas which became the stuff of legend.
But for all the footage available to reflect Coward’s life Thompson becomes desperate when seeking images to link with descriptions of his work for the British Secret Service during the Second World War. To illustrate it through a number of clips showing him in the 1959 film of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana feels ridiculous and will surely puzzle those unfamiliar with Carol Reed’s film. I suspect that elsewhere a brief clip from The Astonished Heart again stands in and such touches as writing words on the screen as was done so effectively by Asif Kapadia during certain songs in his film about Amy Winehouse make no impact here. Mad About the Boy gets by, but it fails to come to life in a way that would make it a memorable exploration of Noël Coward the man and the artist. He deserves better - but for that perhaps we needed a film made some time ago and one that featured colleagues still around and able to reminisce on times past in a vivid manner.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring the voices of Alan Cumming and Rupert Everett.
Dir Barnaby Thompson, Pro Barnaby Thompson and Gregor Cameron, Screenplay Barnaby Thompson, Ed Ben Hilton, Music Rael Jones.
Fragile Films/Unigram/BBC Film/AI Film/Warner Music Entertainment-Altitude Film Entertainment.
92 mins. UK. 2023. UK Rel: 2 June 2023. Cert. 12A.
