WRITER-DIRECTOR-COMPOSER-PRODUCER-ACTOR NOëL COWARD HONORED IN CENTENNIAL RETROSPECTIVE AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
Tribute Includes Thirteen Feature Films, Along with Rare Newsreels and Amateur Movies
The Billy Rose Tribute to Noël Coward September 23-October 5 The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1
As part of the tributes taking place around the world this year to mark the hundredth anniversary of Noël Coward's birth, The Museum of Modern Art presents a comprehensive retrospective of films adapted from Cowards plays, films Coward wrote, produced, directed, and scored, and films in which he appeared as an actor. Running from September 23 to October 5 in the Museum's Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1, The Billy Rose Tribute to Noël Coward spotlights the artist whose works include some of the most important and popular films of wartime and postwar Britain by presenting thirteen feature films, along with rare amateur movies and newsreels featuring Coward, and a World War II documentary.
"The young Noël Coward once wrote his mother: 'I'm not very keen on Hollywood, I'd rather have a nice cup of cocoa,' and he entered the movies expecting to get out quickly and profitably," notes Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Video, who organized the exhibition. "But like his contemporaries Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, he never did manage to escape the cinema, working for some forty years in front of and behind the camera. Although he once referred to the film business as the 'soul-destroying industry,' the medium offered Coward an irresistible opportunity to demonstrate his talents as a writer, director, producer, actor, and composer."
The exhibition, presented in association with the Noël Coward Estate, includes restored prints of his collaborations with David Lean (In Which We Serve, 1942; This Happy Breed, 1944; Blithe Spirit, 1945; and Brief Encounter, 1945); a seldom seen 1967 kinescope of Present Laughter, starring Peter O'Toole; and rare footage from the original London stage production of Coward's play Bitter Sweet, filmed in 1929 by the Pathé studio. Also featured are two silent adaptations from Michael Balcon's Gainsborough Studios (Alfred Hitchcock's Easy Virtue, 1927, and Graham Cutts's The Queen Was in the Parlour, 1927); the British film adaptation of Bitter Sweet, directed in 1933 by Herbert Wilcox; and Cavalcade (1933), directed by Frank Lloyd and starring Diana Wynyard and Clive Brook.
Other highlights in the program are four films with Coward the actor: as a seventeen-year-old boy pushing a wheelbarrow down a village street in D. W. Griffith's Hearts of the World (1918); as a loutish, cynical young publisher in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's The Scoundrel (1935, restored print); as the psychiatrist who embarks on an adulterous affair in Terence Fisher and Anthony Darnborough's 1950 adaptation of Coward's one-act play The Astonished Heart; and as Hawthorne, the consummate imbecile who recruits Alec Guinness into the British secret service in Carol Reed's 1958 adaptation of Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana.
Rounding out the series are screenings of the World War II documentary short Journal of the Resistance (1945), directed by Jean Grémillon with voiceover narration by Coward; a selection of newsreels, including one of Coward travelling to San Francisco to see Gertrude Lawrence perform in Tonight at 8:30; and several amateur movies featuring Coward and other British and American film personalities in a variety of locales, among them Goldenhurst, Coward's farm in England.
This is the third tribute to an actor on which MoMA has collaborated with The Billy Rose Foundation, a major supporter of the arts in New York City. Established in memory of the theater impresario responsible for bringing popular shows such as Jumbo (1935), Carmen Jones (1943), and Seven Lively Arts (1944) to Broadway, the foundation is headed by theatrical producer Arthur Cantor. In 1998 and in early 1999, the Museum and the Foundation presented retrospectives of the films of Ingrid Bergman and Edward G. Robinson, respectively.
The Billy Rose Tribute to Noël Coward was organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Video. The exhibition is made possible by the Billy Rose Foundation, Inc. The Department gratefully acknowledges the participation of Barry Day, the coauthor with Graham Payn of the biography My Life with Noël Coward, the editor of Noël Coward: The Complete Lyrics, and the author of the forthcoming Coward on Film and Coward: A Life in Quotes.
The Department also wishes to thank Bryony Dixon and the National Film and Television Archive, London, for their generous loan of prints for this exhibition.
