BBC2 Playhouse A Song at Twilight (1973–1983) watch online HD

'A Song at Twilight' is the second of Noel Coward's Suite in Two Keys, and perhaps the best of the two. On the face of it this is a comedy but there's a lot more to it - and with Paul Scofield and Deborah Kerr in the cast, there's plenty to watch. Kerr in particular plays it just right - her Carlotta is pure acid in places - while Scofield convinces as the repressed writer about to meet some unsought for truths from his past.

This play is wordy, but funny - as well as delivering some serious messages about tolerance, convenience, and memory. Fascinating to compare with the stage play, recently revived, which stretched perhaps too far to find the comedy. This version of the play gets the balance right and benefits from June Tobin's strong support as the writer's German wife and secretary.

Another one of the play-lets in the Noel Coward Collection from BBC, this one has Paul Scofield and Deborah Kerr; Kerr had starred in An Affair to Remember opposite Cary Grant. The play opens with the writer Hugo (Scofield) and Hilde, who seems to be his wife (June Tobin), discussing his upcoming dinner date with his old flame Carlotta (Deborah Kerr). The conversation for the first act revolves around just how much Hugo will enjoy having dinner with his former love. Then she arrives, and Hilda gets the whole scoop while Hugo is dressing. Bruce Lidington again plays Felix , the butler, and it's entirely too bad that they didn't give him a larger part in this one, as they did in "Come into the Garden Maud", which also had Scofield and Lidington in the cast. While Hugo has always been the more successful author, it turns out that Carlotta has a surprise or two of her own. Interesting story. N. Coward makes you want to watch this one all the way to the end. While this was one of Kerr's last roles, it appears she retired from film and TV a good 20 years before she died in 2007. Kerr had been nominated numerous times, but it was Scofield who won the Oscar for "Man for all Seasons".

This is part of Noel Coward's Suite in Two Keys and appears on the Noel Coward Collection DVD set.

Paul Scofield, Deborah Kerr, and June Tobin star in this story of a famous writer, Hugo Latymer ((Scofield) who is awaiting a visit from his long-ago lover, Carlotta, played by Kerr. His wife (Tobin) is uneasy about it. However, we learn that her husband says unkind things to her and often isn't nice, and she's learned to live with it. She was once his loyal secretary.

Kerr and Scofield are terrific together. It turns out that Carlotta, an actress, wants to publish their love letters. Then she announces she has a few other letters too.

Hugo suspects she's there to blackmail him, but Carlotta has another agenda.

Now, someone described this as funny. I actually didn't find it so except in the beginning when Scofield is establishing his snobbish character. It's about what we do one another from a lack of compassion, our treatment of people due to our own agendas, repression, and how memory becomes twisted over time.

Sobering and quite good.

This is the only full-length play in Suite In Three Keys in which Noel Coward starred for the last time in live theatre in 1966. There are only two reviews on IMDb and neither poster appears to be aware that the play was a thinly-veiled hatchet job on William Somerset Maugham, an eminent English writer who was active from the 1880s to the 1950s, turning out novels, short stories, plays, autobiography, travel books etc, several of which - Rain, The Letter, The Razor's Edge - were adapted for the screen. Although he had married and fathered a daughter, Maugham was a lifelong homosexual who had two long-standing affairs with men, first with Gerald Haxton - for whom Maugham left England and settled in the South of France after Haxton, an American, was deported following a conviction for homosexuality - and later Alan Searle, who was ostensibly Maugham's 'secretary'. At roughly the same time as A Song At Twilight was produced a third homosexual writer (Coward was, of course, homosexual himself), Beverley Nichols, published a novel entitled A Case Of Human Bondage (one of Maugham's most well-known novels was Of Human Bondage) which was also a hatchet job. It is not, of course, necessary to know this to enjoy the play which has one of the finest first-act 'curtains' in twentieth century theatre. Paul Schofield was, of course, a very fine actor but he was unable to equal, let alone eclipse, Coward's performance as Hugo Latymer, whilst Deborah Kerr, looking a good ten years older than the 61 she was at the time, is hopelessly miscast as Hugo's one-time lover, now come back to haunt him. As always with Coward the vote is based on the writing rather than the acting.

You might wonder, since I'm not really a Deborah Kerr fan and I can't stand Paul Scofield, why I'd bother to sit through A Song at Twilight. Well, my mom loves Deborah Kerr, so to be nice, I thought I'd rent a movie of hers she hadn't seen. We were so bored, we actually fast-forwarded parts of it.

Paul Scofield plays a famous writer who's married to June Tobin. There's an incredibly long setup in the beginning about how nervous he is to be meeting ex-girlfriend Deborah Kerr after decades. When she finally shows up, they talk in circles, not getting to the point and boring the audience. When they finally do, the audience has long ago guessed Paul's big secret. No offense to Deborah, but this is far from her finest hour. Paul Scofield doesn't really put anything into his performance either, and June Tobin's character seems utterly superfluous.