When it was revived for the first time in 1972 in New York, The Scoundrel gathered this notice from The New Yorker critic Penelope Gilliatt: “In 1935, the young Noel Coward acted in a Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur film called The Scoundrel, which hasn't been seen publicly in New York until now for twenty years. I went to it when I was ten or twelve and have gone about mumbling lines from it ever since. ‘It'll be a perfect match,' the Coward character says about the prospect of his getting married to someone vapid. ‘Two empty paper bags belaboring each other.' And a walk in Central Park is proposed: ‘On a Sunday?' he says. ‘It's full of butlers.' Coward plays a dissolute publisher seething with self-dislike and charm. His assistant consults him about the topics for the firm's new list. ‘Are we interested in the working man's woes?' asks the assistant. ‘Only vaguely,' says authority, definitely. No one gets to a full stop with the same speed and style as Coward. He props there like a polo pony beside a ball. The Scoundrel is really an experiment to see what will happen if you put together a lot of Hollywood stock ingredients and then throw in Coward to wreck them. Hecht and MacArthur had the notion of writing, producing and directing a film that would confound cow-lidded moviegoing taste by taking the form of a violently suave fairy tale. The narrative goes into an eerie curl of mood three-quarters of the way through: Coward is killed in an air crash, returns from the dead healed even of liking booze, and can be put to rest (says God, in Coward's voice) only by the mourning of someone who really loves him. The ending, liquidly photographed, should put no one off. The film as a whole is a wonderful exercise in the debonair, with a kind of crippled poetry about it because of the tacit determination of the principals to note that there is all the difference in the world between a wisecrack and a wise saying.”