Scoundrel
Directed by Ben HechtAnthony Mallare is a New York literary publisher of considerable charm and no discernible moral architecture. He exploits writers, seduces women, and discards both with equal indifference, moving through Manhattan's cultural elite as though immunity were his birthright. Into his orbit comes Cora Moore, a young poet whose manuscript he agrees to publish – and whose devotion he accepts as simply another due.
When Mallare's careless manipulation costs Cora everything and drives her toward ruin, the consequences begin accumulating around him. His associates – the sardonic critic Vanderveer Veyden, the loyal Jimmy Clay, the various women he has used and left – form a kind of involuntary chorus to his destruction. Paul Decker, a writer Mallare has wronged, watches the machinery tighten. The film's social world, glittering and brittle, starts to register the weight of what Mallare has taken from it.
Scoundrel occupies an unusual position in pre-noir cinema: it uses the apparatus of a sophisticated comedy of manners to deliver something closer to a moral fable, with Noël Coward's reptilian charm doing the work that shadows and rain-slicked streets would do in later noir. The film is less interested in crime than in culpability, and it pursues that interest with a coldness that anticipates the genre's harder postwar iterations.
