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The Scoundrel
Year - 1935
Studio - Paramount
Stars - Noël Coward, Julie Haydon, Stanley Ridges
Director - Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur
Writing Credits - Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur
Synopsis (AI Generated)
Plot Synopsis (with spoilers)
Anthony Mallare (Noël Coward) is a wealthy, cynical New York publisher — brilliant, witty, and thoroughly heartless. He surrounds himself with sycophants and discarded lovers, humiliating his authors and mistresses alike. When one of his writers, Slezack (Harry Davenport), commits suicide after Mallare refuses to publish his second book, Mallare dismisses it with a cruel quip rather than remorse. His inner circle includes his cast-off girlfriend Julia Vivian (Martha Sleeper), another former lover Margie (Hope Williams), his loyal but weary aide Jimmy Clay (Ernest Cossart), and various literary hangers-on played by Alexander Woollcott (as critic Vanderveer Veyden), Lionel Stander, and Eduardo Ciannelli.
Into this decadent world comes Cora Moore (Julie Haydon), a young, idealistic poet engaged to her childhood sweetheart, engineer Paul Decker (Stanley Ridges). Mallare, seeing her only as a fresh conquest, offers to publish her poetry and deliberately sets out to seduce her away from Decker — not out of love, but out of boredom and cruelty. Cora falls for him and breaks off her engagement, becoming Mallare's mistress for several months. The jealous, humiliated Decker eventually storms into Mallare's office and shoots him — but the bullet is stopped by a cigarette case. Mallare magnanimously declines to press charges, but Decker spirals into drinking and legal trouble, needing $5,000 to stay out of prison.
By this point, Mallare has grown tired of Cora and moved on to Margie, whom he plans to marry in Bermuda. When Cora comes to him for money to help Decker, Mallare coldly refuses. Enraged and heartbroken, she curses him, telling him she hopes his plane crashes on the way to Bermuda.
It does. Mallare is killed — but because he lived and died without ever loving or being loved by anyone, a divine power grants his spirit one month back on Earth: if he can find a single person willing to shed a genuine tear over his death, his soul will be spared damnation.
Mallare returns as an unseen, ghostly presence, drifting through the lives of his former friends and enemies, all of whom are stunned to find evidence that he's somehow "back," and slowly realize something supernatural is happening. He seeks out Cora, the one person he wronged most deeply, hoping to finally inspire real love or grief rather than the contempt he's earned from everyone else. In the end, it is Cora — despite everything he did to her — who finally weeps for him, and Mallare's soul is redeemed.
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