The Scoundrel 1935

Anthony Mallare, Noël Coward, is a ruthless publisher who seems to take perverse pleasure in sabotaging the lives of everyone he encounters. He treats people as tools in his vast, cold scheme for power, and he makes no secret of his belief that the world is there to be bent to his will. He even proclaims to his staff that he has found the perfect partner—someone as empty as he is—and that he must marry her. I must marry her … it would be like two empty paper bags belabouring one another.

His calculated cruelty ultimately takes down the career and life of an aspiring young author, Stanley Ridges and his girlfriend, who is the character Cora Moore portrayed by Julie Haydon. She curses him with the grim wish that he die friendless, a line that foreshadows the moral reckoning to come. The power of Mallare’s voice and his chilling certainty ripple through the lives of those who crossed his path, leaving behind a trail of rumors, ruined opportunities, and a chilling sense that no one is truly safe from a man who wields words like weapons.

Shortly after, Mallare is killed when his plane crashes into the ocean. > I’ve just found out there IS a God! < This shocking moment is uttered by Haydon’s character, a declaration that springs from the very flame of misfortune he helped ignite. In the wake of his death, Mallare is granted an extraordinary, supernatural reprieve: he is allowed to return to earth to find one person who will mourn for him. That person turns out to be the woman connected to the vice he loved to ruin—the same girlfriend whose life he once aimed to extinguish.

As he reenters the world, those around him are astonished to see him alive and back at work, yet a chill grows as they begin to perceive that something larger, something supernatural, is at play. The tale unfolds with a quiet dread, tracing how a man who thrived on crushing others is finally exposed to the weight of his own deeds through a second chance that blurs the line between punishment and mercy. The narrative tightens around themes of justice, redemption, and the eerie possibility that the dead can influence the living when the heavens themselves meddle in mortal affairs.