Ben Hecht
Encyclopedia
Ben Hecht (ˈ ; 1894–1964) was an American
screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, and novelist. Called "the Shakespeare of Hollywood", he received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some 70 films and as a prolific storyteller, authored 35 books and created some of the most entertaining screenplays and plays in America. Film historian Richard Corliss
called him "the" Hollywood screenwriter, someone who "personified Hollywood itself." The Dictionary of Literary Biography - American Screenwriters calls him "one of the most successful screenwriters in the history of motion pictures."
He was the first screenwriter to receive an Academy Award for Original Screenplay, for the movie Underworld
(1927). The number of screenplays he wrote or worked on that are now considered classics is, according to Chicago's Newberry Library
, "astounding," and included films such as, Scarface
(1932), The Front Page
, Twentieth Century
(1934), Barbary Coast
(1935), Nothing Sacred
(1937), Some Like It Hot
, Gone with the Wind
, Gunga Din
, Wuthering Heights
, (all 1939), His Girl Friday
(1940), Spellbound
(1945), Notorious (1946), Monkey Business
, A Farewell to Arms
(1957), Mutiny on the Bounty
(1962), and Casino Royale
(released posthumously, in 1967). He also provided story ideas for such films as Stagecoach (1939). In 1940, he wrote, produced, and directed, Angels Over Broadway
, which was nominated for Best Screenplay. In total, six of his movie screenplays were nominated for Academy Awards, with two winning.
He became an active Zionist shortly before the Holocaust
began in Germany, and as a result wrote articles and plays about the plight of Europe's Jews, such as We Will Never Die in 1943 and A Flag is Born
in 1946. Of his seventy to ninety screenplays, he wrote many anonymously to avoid the British boycott
of his work in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The boycott was a response to Hecht's active support of paramilitary action against British forces in Palestine (see below), during which time a supply ship to Palestine was named the S.S. Ben Hecht.
He could produce a screenplay in two weeks and, according to his autobiography, never spent more than eight weeks on a script. Yet he was still able to produce mostly rich, well-plotted, and witty screenplays. His scripts included virtually every movie genre: adventures, musicals, and impassioned romances. But ultimately, he was best known for two specific types of film: crime thrillers and screwball comedies. Despite his success, however, he disliked the effect that movies were having on the theater, American cultural standards, and on his own creativity.
, the son of Russian–Jewish
immigrants. Hecht’s father, Joseph Hecht, was a garment worker whose specialty was cutting cloth to patterns. He and his future wife, Sarah Swernofski, had immigrated to the Lower East Side from Minsk
, Belarus
, then part of the Russian Empire
. The family language was Yiddish. The Hechts married on the Lower East Side
in 1892 and Ben was born the next year.
The family moved to Racine
, Wisconsin
, where Ben attended high school. When Hecht was in his early teens he would spend the summers with an uncle in Chicago. On the road much of the time, his father did not have much effect on Hecht’s childhood, and his mother was busy managing the store outlet in downtown Racine. Film author Scott Siegal wrote, "He was considered a child prodigy at age 10, seemingly on his way to a career as a concert violinist, but two years later was performing as a circus acrobat.".
After graduating from high school in 1910, Hecht moved to Chicago, lived with relatives, and started a career in journalism. At sixteen, he ran away to live permanently in Chicago, and found work as a reporter, first for the Chicago Journal, and later with the Chicago Daily News
. He was an excellent reporter who worked on several Chicago papers. After World War I
, Hecht was sent to cover Berlin
for the Chicago Daily News. There he wrote his first and most successful novel, Erik Dorn (1921). It was a sensational debut for Hecht as a serious writer.
The 1969 movie, Gaily, Gaily
, directed by Norman Jewison
and starring Beau Bridges
as "Ben Harvey", was based on his life during his early years working as a reporter in Chicago, and was nominated for three Oscars. The story was taken from a portion of his autobiography, A Child of the Century.
From 1918 to 1919 Hecht served as war correspondent in Berlin
for the Chicago Daily News
. According to Siegel, "Besides being a war reporter, he was noted for being a tough crime reporter while also becoming known in Chicago literary circles.".
In 1921, Hecht inaugurated a Daily News column called One Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago. While it lasted, the column was enormously influential. His editor, Henry Justin Smith, later said it represented a new concept in journalism:
While at the Chicago Daily News, Hecht famously broke the 1921 "Ragged Stranger Murder Case" story, about the murder of Carl Wanderer
's wife, which led to the trial and execution of war hero Carl Wanderer. In Chicago, he also met and befriended Maxwell Bodenheim
, an American poet and novelist, known as the King of Greenwich Village
Bohemians, and with whom he became a lifelong friend.
After concluding One Thousand and One Afternoons, Hecht went on to produce novels, plays, screenplays, and memoirs, but none of these eclipsed his early success in finding the stuff of literature in city life. Recalling that period, Hecht wrote, "I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops. I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me."
and together they moved to New York to collaborate on their play, The Front Page
. It was widely acclaimed and had a successful run on Broadway of 281 performances, beginning August,1928. In 1931 it was turned into a successful film which was nominated for three Oscars.
he was sent by the Chicago Daily News to Berlin
to witness the revolutionary movements, which gave him the material for his first novel, Erik Dorn (1921). ... A daily column he wrote, 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, was later collected into a book, and brought Hecht fame." These works enhanced his reputation in the literary scene as a reporter, columnist, short story writer, and novelist. After leaving the News in 1923 he started his own newspaper The Chicago Literary Times.
According to biographer author Eddy Applegate, "Hecht read voraciously the works of Gautier
, Adelaide
, Mallarmé
, and Verlaine
, and developed a style that was extraordinary and imaginative. The use of metaphor
, image
ry, and vivid phrases made his writing distinct... again and again Hecht showed an uncanny ability to picture the strange jumble of events in strokes as vivid and touching as the brushmarks of a novelist."
"Ben Hecht was the enfant terrible of American letters in the first half of the twentieth century," wrote author Sanford Sternlicht. "If Hecht was consistently opposed to anything, it was to censorship
of literature
, art, and film by either the government or self-appointed guardians of public morality." He adds, "Even though he never attended college, Hecht became a successful novelist, playwright, journalist, and screenwriter. His star has sunk below the horizon now, but in his own lifetime Hecht became one of the most famous American literary and entertainment figures..."
Eventually Hecht became associated with the writers Sherwood Anderson
, Theodore Dreiser
, Maxwell Bodenheim
, Carl Sandburg
, and Pascal Covici
. He knew Margaret Anderson and contributed to her Little Review, the magazine of the Chicago "literary renaissance," and to Smart Set.
A Child of the Century
In 1954 Hecht published his autobiography, A Child of the Century, which, according to literary critic Robert Schmuhl, "received such extensive critical acclaim that his literary reputation improved markedly during the last decade of his life... Hecht's vibrant and candid memoir of more than six hundred pages restored him to the stature of a serious and significant American writer." Novelist Saul Bellow
commented about the book for the New York Times: "His manners are not always nice, but then nice manners do not always make interesting autobiographies, and this autobiography has the merit of being intensely interesting...If he is occasionally slick, he is also independent, forthright and original. Among the pussycats who write of social issues today he roars like an old-fashioned lion."
Ghostwriting Marilyn Monroe's biography
Besides working on novels and short stories (see book list), he has been credited with ghostwriting books, including Marilyn Monroe
's autobiography
My Story. "The reprint of Marilyn Monroe's memoir, My Story, in the year 2000, by Cooper Square Press, correctly credits Ben Hecht as an author, ending a period of almost 50 years in which Hecht's role was denied...Hecht himself publicly denied writing it until much later..."
According to Monroe biographer Sarah Churchwell, Monroe was "persuaded to capitalize on her newfound celebrity by beginning an autobiography. It was born out of a collaboration with journalist and screenwriter Ben Hecht, hired as a ghostwriter ..." Churchwell adds that the truths in her story were highly selective. "Hecht reported to his editor during the interviews that he was sometimes sure Marilyn was fabricating. He explained, 'When I say lying, I mean she isn’t telling the truth. I don’t think so much that she is trying to deceive me as that she is a fantasizer.'"
Film historian Richard Corliss
writes that "Ben Hecht was the Hollywood screenwriter...[and] it can be said without too much exaggeration that Hecht personifies Hollywood itself." Movie columnist Pauline Kael
added that "between them, Hecht and Jules Furthman
wrote most of the best American talkies." His movie career can be defined by about twenty credited screenplays he wrote for Hawks, Hitchcock, Hathaway, Lubitsch, Wellman, Sternberg, and himself. He wrote many of those with his two regular collaborators, Charles MacArthur
and Charles Lederer
.
While living in New York in 1926, he received a telegram from screenwriter friend Herman J. Mankiewicz
, who had recently moved to Los Angeles
. "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots", it read. "Don't let this get around." As a writer in need of money, he traveled to Hollywood as Mankiewicz suggested.
Working in Hollywood
He arrived in Los Angeles and began his career at the beginning of the sound era by writing the story for Josef von Sternberg
's gangster movie, Underworld
, in 1927. For that first screenplay and story he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in Hollywood's first Academy award ceremony. Soon afterward, he became the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood..." Hecht spent from two to twelve weeks in Hollywood each year, "during which he earned enough money (his record was $100,000 in one month, for two screenplays) to live on for the rest of the year in New York, where he did what he considered his serious writing," writes film historian Carol Easton. Nonetheless, later in his career, "he was a writer who liked to think that his genius had been stifled by Hollywood and by its dreadful habit of giving him so much money."
Yet his income was as much a result of his skill as a writer as well as his early jobs with newspapers. As film historians Mast and Kawin wrote, "The newspaper reporters often seemed like gangsters who had accidentally ended up behind a typewriter rather than a tommy gun; they talked and acted as rough as the crooks their assignments forced them to cover...It is no accident that Ben Hecht, the greatest screenwriter of rapid-fire, flavorful tough talk as well as a major comic playwright, wrote gangster pictures, prison pictures, and newspaper pictures."
Hecht became one of Hollywood's most prolific screenwriters, able to write a full screenplay in two to eight weeks. According to Samuel Goldwyn
biographer Carol Easton, in 1931, with his writing partner Charles MacArthur
, he "knocked out The Unholy Garden in twelve hours. Hecht subsequently received a fan letter from producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr.:
Censorship, profit, and art
Despite his monetary success, however, Hecht always kept Hollywood at arms's length. According to film historian Gregory Black, "he did not consider his work for the movies serioius art; it was more a means of replenishing his bank account. When his work was finished, he retreated to New York."
At least part of the reason for this was due to the industry's system of censorship
. Black writes, "as Mankiewicz, Selznick, and Hecht knew all too well, much of the blame for the failure of the movies to deal more frankly and honestly with life lay with a rigid censorship imposed on the industry . . . [and] on the content of films during its golden era of studio production." Because the costs of production and distribution were so high, the primary "goal of the studios was profit, not art. . .[and] fearful of losing any segment of their audiences, the studios either carefully avoided controversial topics or presented them in a way that evaded larger issues," thereby creating only 'harmless entertainment' ".
According to historian David Thomson, "to their own minds, Herman Mankiewicz and Ben Hecht both died morose and frustrated. Neither of them had written the great books they believed possible."
with Howard Hawks
In an interview with director Howard Hawks
, with whom Hecht worked on many films, Scott Breivold elicited comments on the way they often worked:
with David O. Selznick
According to fim historian Virginia Wexman, "David Selznick had a flair for the dramatic, and no one knew that better than Ben Hecht. The two collaborated on some of Hollywood’s biggest hits – movies like Gone With the Wind and Notorious and Duel in the Sun – and often enough the making of those films was as rife with conflict as the films themselves..."
Nothing Sacred
is probably the "most famous of all the Carole Lombard
films next to My Man Godfrey
," wrote movie historian James Harvey. And it impressed people at the time with its evident ambition ... "and Selznick determined to make the classiest of all screwball comedies, turned to Lombard as a necessity, but also to Ben Hecht, nearly the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood at the time, especially for comedy. ... it was also the first screwball comedy to lay apparent claim to larger satiric meanings, to make scathing observations about American life and society."
In an interview with Irene Selznick, ex-wife of producer David O. Selznick
, she discussed the other leading screenwriters of that time:
with Ernst Lubitsch
According to James Harvey, Ernst Lubitsch
felt uneasy in the world of playwright Noel Coward
. "If Coward could write his play for three particular actors, he reasoned to an interviewer, why couldn’t it be rewritten for three others? It was at this point … that he turned to Ben Hecht...to work with him on the screenplay for Design for Living
." It was the first and only Lubitsch-Hecht collaboration. Harvey adds, "Though Lubitsch must have been reassured by Hecht’s taking the job. No writer in Hollywood had better credentials in the tough, slangy, specifically American style that Lubitsch wanted to impart to the Coward play. And together they transformed it."
wrote many years ago, "seemed the personification of the writer at the top of his game, the top of his world, not gnawing at doubting himself as great writers were said to do, but with every word and every gesture indicating the animal pleasure he took in writing well."
"Movies," Hecht was to recall, "were seldom written. In 1927 they were yelled into existence in conferences that kept going in saloons, brothels, and all-night poker games. Movie sets roared with arguments and organ music."
He was best known for two specific and contrasting types of film: crime thrillers and screwball comedies. Among crime thrillers, Hecht was responsible for such films as The Unholy Night
(1929), the classic Scarface
(1932), and Hitchcock's Notorious. Among his comedies, there were The Front Page
, which led to many remakes, Noel Coward
's Design for Living
(1933), Twentieth Century
, Nothing Sacred
, and Howard Hawks
' Monkey Business
(1952).
Film historian Richard Corliss wrote, "it is his crisp, frenetic, sensational prose and dialogue style that elevates his work above that of the dozens of other reporters who streamed west to cover and exploit Hollywood's biggest 'story': the talkie revolution.
early in his career. "...in the early 1920s, Hecht organized campaigns against the Ku Klux Klan
, whose lynchings of minorities, primarily blacks, terrorized the American South and North... Artists and writers joined the effort, blending civil rights into the arts and literary scene...
"Hecht wrote enough stories about black/white dynamics to form a small collection, including To Bert Williams
, a richly symbolic obituary to the eminent vaudevillian, the thought provoking The Miracle...In the same period, circa May–June 1923, Hecht ... collaborated on a musical with Dave Payton (Peyton), jazz pianist and music critic for the black newspaper the Chicago Defender
...He broke taboos by publishing a regular column, Black-belt Shadows, about Chicago and broader AfroAmerica by young William Moore -- with the then-daring editorial note: 'This column is conducted by a Negro journalist.' A factor in his willingness to work with blacks on occasion was his first playwriting experience: His collaborator was a young black student.
"Hecht film stories featuring black characters included Hallelujah, I'm a Bum
, co-starring Edgar Conner as Al Jolson
's sidekick in a politically savvy rhymed dialogue over Richard Rodgers
music." (Jolson, a noted blackface performer and star of The Jazz Singer
, was also active in promoting racial equality on the Broadway stage.)
"Hecht's most important race film historically was the Frank Capra
message film The Negro Soldier
, a feature length tribute shown to the armed forces and civilians during World War II
."
, the Soviet Union
and China
." Among those who signed were former Nobel Prize
winners in science, and others persons eminent in education, literature and the arts. It advocated "the protection of civil liberties and the rights of labor, ... the elimination of all forms of racial and religious discrimination from our public and private life ... [and] the world-wide defense of human liberty ... There can be no victory over Hitlerlism abroad if democracy is destroyed at home."
Later that year, he had his first musical collaboration with symphonic composer Ferde Grofe
on their patriotic cantata Uncle Sam Stands Up.
late in life and lived for a while on Henry Street, where he could absorb the energy and social consciousness of the ghetto," wrote author Sanford Sternlicht. In later years, before World War II began, Hecht "took on a ten year commitment to publicize the atrocities befalling his own religious minority, the Jews of Europe and the quest for survivors, to find a permanent home in the Middle East." In 1943, during the midst of the Holocaust, he predicted, in a widely published article in Reader's Digest magazine, "Of these 6,000,000 Jews [of Europe], almost a third have already been massacred by Germans, Romanians and Hungarians, and the most conservative of scorekeepers estimate that before the war ends at least another third will have been done to death."
Also in 1943, "out of frustration over American policy and outrage at Hollywood's fear of offending its European markets," he organized and wrote a pageant, We Will Never Die, which was produced by Billy Rose
and Ernst Lubitsch
and with the help of composer Kurt Weill
and staging by Moss Hart
. The pageant was performed at Madison Square Garden
for two shows in front of 40,000 people in March, 1943. It then traveled nationwide, including a performance at the Hollywood Bowl. Hecht was disappointed nonetheless. As Weill noted afterwards, ""The pageant has accomplished nothing. Actually, all we have done is make a lot of Jews cry, which is not a unique accomplishment."
A Flag is Born
Ben Hecht's activism began when he met Peter Bergson. Hecht wrote in his book Perfidy
that he used to be a scriptwriter until his meeting with Bergson, when he accidentally bumped into history - i.e. the burning need to do anything possible to save the doomed Jews of Europe (paraphrase from Perfidy). After meeting Bergson, Hecht dedicated himself to working with his rescue group, and after the war ended he continued work for the establishment of the State of Israel
. He wrote the screenplay for the Bergson Group’s production of A Flag is Born
, which opened on September 5, 1946 at the Alvin Playhouse in New York City.
The play starred Marlon Brando
and Paul Muni
during its various productions. The proceeds from the play were used to purchase a ship that was renamed the S.S. Ben Hecht, which carried 900 refugees to Palestine in March, 1947. The British Navy captured the ship after it docked and sent 600 of its passengers to detention camps in Cyprus
. The S.S. Ben Hecht later became the flagship of the Israeli Navy.
Six months after the establishment of Israel by the United Nations
, Bergson and Hecht officially dissolved the organization which produced the fund-raising play, followed by a dinner in New York City where Menachem Begin
appeared, saying, "I believe that my people, liberated and re-assembled in its country, will contribute its full share toward the progress of all mankind ... [and predicted] that all of Palestine eventually would be free and that peace and brotherhood would prevail among Arabs and Jews alike."
Thanks to his fund-raising, speeches, and jawboning, Sternlicht writes, "Ben Hecht did more to help Jewish refugees from the Holocaust and to ensure the survival of the nascent State of Israel than any other American Jew in the twentieth century". As much as anything, it was the abiding love of his Jewish parent and Rose Hecht that motivated the writer to become arguably "the most effective propagandist the Jewish state ever had." In 1964, at Hecht’s funeral service at Temple Rodeph Shalom in New York City, among the eulogists was Menachem Begin
, the future Prime Minister of Israel.
Blacklisted in the UK
From 1948 to 1951, Hecht's films were blacklist
ed in the UK by a "concerted action by English film exhibitors to boycott" films written by him. This was a result of "his intemperate utterances on the Palestine problem," according to one source. In May 1947, for instance, ten months after Irgun, the Jewish insurgency organisation led by Begin, had responded to British arrests by blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, British military headquarters at the time, killing 91 people, including Arabs and Jews as well as Britons, Hecht addressed Jewish militants thus: 'Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.' His films were banned in the UK, and of the ones shown, his name was removed from the credits.
Underworld
was the story of a petty hoodlum with political pull; it was based on a real Chicago gangster Hecht knew. "The film began the gangster film genre that became popular in the early 1930s." And along with Scarface, "were the alpha and omega of Hollywood's first gangster craze." In it, he "manages both to congratulate journalism for its importance and to chastise it for its chicanery, by underlining the newspapers' complicity in promoting the underworld image."
"Like so many of his films, Underworld and Scarface are 'stories' that ace-reporter Hecht loved to cover, as much for the larger-than-life qualities of his headliners as for the enormity of their crimes. Love-hate ... fascination-revulsion ... expose'-glorification ... these are the polarities that make Hecht's best films deliciously ambiguous." "Hecht's introduction, which is nothing if not moody and Sandburgian, describes 'A great city in the dead of night - streets lonely, moon-flooded - buildings empty as the cliff-dwellings of a forgotten age."
Hecht was noted for confronting producers and directors when he wasn't satisfied with the way they used his scripts. For this film, at one point he demanded that its director, Josef von Sternberg
remove his name from the credits since Sternberg unilaterally changed one scene. Afterwards, however, he relented and took credit for the film's story, which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay - the first year the awards were presented.
The Front Page (1931)
After contributing to the original stories for a number of films, he worked without credit on the first film version of his original 1928 play The Front Page
. It was produced by Howard Hughes
and directed by Lewis Milestone
in 1931. James Harvey writes, "it is Hecht and MacArthur’s Chicago ... that counts most deeply in the imagination of Hollywood. And their play, the first of the great newspaper comedies, did more to define the tone and style, the look and the sound of Hollywood comedy than any other work of its time."
Of the original play, theater producer and writer Jed Harris
writes, "...here is a play which reflects miraculously the real as well as the literary personalities of the playwrights. Every line of it glows with a demoniacal humor, sordid, insolent and mischievous to the point of down right perversity, in which one instantly recognizes the heroic comic spirit of its authors... Both Hecht and MacArthur owe their literary origins to the newspapers of Chicago. Famous crime reporters, their talents were first cradled in the recounting of great exploits in arson, rape, murder, gang war and municipal politics. Out of a welter of jail breaks, hangings, floods and whore-house raidings, they have gathered the rich, savory characters who disport themselves on the stage to Times Square Theatre."
Scarface (1932)
After ushering in the beginning of the gangster film with Underworld, his next film became one of the best films of that genre. Scarface
was directed by Howard Hawks
, with "Hecht the wordsmith and Hawks the engineer...", who became "one of the few directors with whom Hecht enjoyed working." It starred Paul Muni
playing the role of an Al Capone
-like gangster. "Scarface's all-but-suffocating vitality is a kind of cinematic version of tabloid prose at its best."
The story of how Scarface came to be written represents Hecht's writing style in those days. Film historian Max Wilk interviewed Leyland Hayward, an independent literary agent, who, in 1931, managed to convince Hecht that a young oil tycoon in Texas named Howard Hughes
wanted him to write the screenplay to his first book. Hayward wrote about that period:
Twentieth Century (1934)
For his next film, Twentieth Century
, he wrote the screenplay in collaboration with Charles MacArthur
as an adaptation of their original play from 1932. It was directed by Howard Hawks, and starred John Barrymore
and Carole Lombard
. It's a comedy about a Broadway producer who was losing his leading lady to the seductive Hollywood film industry, and will do anything to win her back.
It's "a fast-paced, witty film that contains the rapid-fire dialogue for which Hecht became famous. It is one of the first, and finest, of the screwball comedies of the 1930s."
Viva Villa! (1934)
This was the story about Mexican rebel Pancho Villa
, who takes to the hills after killing an overseer in revenge for his father's death. It was directed by Howard Hawks and starred Wallace Beery
. Although the movie took liberties with the facts, it became a great success, and Hecht received an Academy award nomination for his screenplay adaptation.
In a letter from the film's producer, David O. Selznick
, to studio head Louis B. Mayer
, Selznick discussed the need for a script rewrite:
Barbary Coast (1935)
Barbary Coast
was also directed by Howard Hawks and starred Miriam Hopkins
and Edward G. Robinson
. The film takes place in late nineteenth century San Francisco with Hopkins playing the role of a dance-hall girl up against Robinson, who runs the town.
Nothing Sacred (1938)
Nothing Sacred
became Hecht's first project after he and Charles MacArthur closed their failing film company which they started in 1934. The film was adapted from his play, Hazel Flagg, and starred Carole Lombard as a small-town girl diagnosed with radium poisoning. "A reporter makes her case a cause for his newspaper. The story "allowed Hecht to work with one of his favorite themes, hypocrisy (especially among journalists); he took the themes of lying, decadence, and immorality and made them into a sophisticated screwball comedy."
Gunga Din (1939)
Gunga Din
was co-written with Charles MacArthur and became "one of Hollywood's greatest action-adventure films." The screenplay was based on the poem by Rudyard Kipling
, directed by George Stevens
and starred Cary Grant
and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
. In 1999 the film was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress.
Wuthering Heights (1939)
After working without credit on Gone with the Wind
in 1939, he co-wrote (with Charles MacArthur) an adaptation of Emily Bronte
's novel Wuthering Heights
. Although the screenplay was actually cut off at the story's half-way point as it was considered too long, it was nominated for an Academy Award.
It's a Wonderful World (1939)
Movie historian James Harvey notes that in some respects It’s a Wonderful World is an even more accomplished film –the comedy counterpart to the supremely assured and high-spirited work Van Dyke had done on San Francisco (1936). "Ben Hecht, another speed specialist, wrote the screenplay (from a story by Hecht and Herman Mankiewicz); it’s in his Front Page vein, with admixtures of It Happened One Night
and Bringing Up Baby
, as well as surprising adumbrations of the forties private-eye film.
Angels Over Broadway (1940)
Angels Over Broadway
was the only movie he directed, produced, and wrote originally for film, other than Specter of the Rose
(1946). It was considered "one of his most personal works." It starred Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
and Rita Hayworth
and was nominated for an Academy award. "The dialogue as well as the script's descriptive passages are chock full of brittle Hechtian similes that sparkle on the page but turn leaden when delivered. Hecht was an endlessly articulate raconteur. In his novels and memoirs, articulation dominates..."
In the script, he experimented with "reflections of life - as if a ghost were drifiting in the rain." These "reflections" of sidewalks, bridges, glass, and neon make the film a visual prototype of the forties film noir
.
Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946)
For Alfred Hitchcock
he wrote a number of his best psycho-dramas and received his final Academy award nomination for Notorious. He also worked without credit on Hitchcock's next two films, The Paradine Case
(1947) and Rope
(1948). Spellbound
, the first time Hitchcock worked with Hecht, is notable for being one of the first Hollywood movies to deal seriously with the subject of psychoanalysis.
Monkey Business (1952)
In 1947 he teamed up with Charles Lederer
and cowrote three films: Her Husband's Affairs, Kiss of Death
, and Ride the Pink Horse. In 1950 he cowrote The Thing without credit. They again teamed up to write the 1952 screwball comedy Monkey Business
, which became Hecht's last true success as a screenwriter.
, The Shop Around the Corner
, Foreign Correspondent
, His Girl Friday
(the second film version of his play The Front Page), The Sun Also Rises
, Mutiny on the Bounty
, Casino Royale
(1967), and The Greatest Show on Earth
.
Often, the only evidence of Hecht's involvement in a movie's screenplay has come from letters.
The following are snippets of letters discussing The Sun Also Rises
, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
:
The following letter discusses Portrait of Jennie
(1948):
Gone with the Wind (1939)
For original screenplay writer Sidney Howard
, film historian Joanne Yeck writes, "reducing the intricacies of Gone with the Wind
's epic dimensions was a herculean task...and Howard's first submission was far too long, and would have required at least six hours of film; ... [producer] Selznick wanted Howard to remain on the set to make revisions...but Howard refused to leave New England [and] as a result, revisions were handled by a host of local writers, including Ben Hecht..." "Producer David O. Selznick
replaced the film's director three weeks into filming and then had the script rewritten. He sought out director Victor Fleming
, who, at the time, was directing The Wizard of Oz
. Fleming was dissatisfied with the script, so Selznick brought in famed writer Ben Hecht to rewrite the entire screenplay within five days." Hecht was not credited, however, for his contribution, and Sydney Howard received the Academy award for Best Screenplay.
In a letter from Selznick to film editor O'Shea [10/19/1939], Selznick discussed how the writing credits should appear, taking into consideration that Sidney Howard died a few months earlier after a farm-tractor accident at his home in Massachusetts:
In a letter [9/25/1939] from Selznick to Hecht, regarding writing introductory sequences and titles which were used to set the scene and condense the narrative throughout the movie, Selznick wrote,
His Girl Friday (1940)
"His Girl Friday
remains not just the fastest-talking romantic comedy ever made, but a very tricky inquiry into love's need for a chase (or a dream) and the sharpest pointer to uncertain gender roles."
The D.C. Examiner writes, "Director Howard Hawks’ 1940 classic “His Girl Friday” is not just one of the funniest screwball comedies ever made, it is also one of the finest film adaptations of a stage play. "Hawks took Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s Broadway hit “The Front Page,” the best play about newspapers ever written, and, by changing the gender of a major character, turned it into a romantic comedy. The new script was by Hecht (uncredited) and Charles Lederer
."
Casino Royale (1967)
Hecht wrote the first screenplay for Ian Fleming
's first novel, Casino Royale
. Although the final screenplay and film was made into a comedy spoof, Hecht's version was written as a straight Bond adventure, states spy novelist Jeremy Duns
, who recently discovered the original lost scripts. According to Duns, Hecht's version included elements hard to imagine in a film adaptation, adding that "these drafts are a master-class in thriller-writing, from the man who arguably perfected the form with Notorious." Hecht himself wrote that he has "never had more fun writing a movie," and felt the James Bond character was cinema’s first "gentleman superman" in a long time, as opposed to Hammett and Chandler’s "roughneck supermen." A few days before the final screenplay was announced to the press, Hecht died of a heart attack at his home.
Duns compares Hecht's unpublished screenplay with the final rewritten film:
from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959
"The factors that laid low so whooping and puissant an empire as the old Hollywood are many. I can think of a score, including the barbarian hordes of Television. But there is one that stands out for me in the post-mortem.... The factor had to do with the basis of movie-making: ‘Who shall be in charge of telling the story.’
...
“The answer Hollywood figured out for this question was what doomed it. It figured out that writers were not to be in charge of creating stories. Instead, a curious tribe of inarticulate Pooh-Bahs called Supervisors and , later, Producers were summoned out of literary nowhere and given a thousand scepters. It was like switching the roles of teacher and pupil in the fifth grade. The result is now history. An industry based on writing had to collapse when the writer was given an errand-boy status.
...
“The writer is a definite human phenomenon. He is almost a type – as pugilists are a type. He may be a bad writer – an insipid one or a clumsy one – but there is a bug in him that keeps spinning yarns; and that bulges his brow a bit, narrows his jaws, weakens his eyes and gives him girl children instead of boys. Nobody but a writer can write. People who hang around writers for years – as producers did – who are much smarter and have much better taste, never learn to write.
...
“Most of my script-writing friends – I never had more than a handful—took eagerly to the bottle or the analyst’s couch, filled their extravagant ménages with threats of suicide, hurled themselves into hysterical amours. And some of them actually died in their forties and fifties. Among these were the witty Herman Mankiewicz and F. Scott Fitzgerald
, the fine novelist.
...
“I have known a handful of producers who actually were equal or superior to the writers with whom they worked. These producers were a new kind of nonwriting writer hatched by the movies—as Australia produced wingless birds. They wrote without pencils or even words. Using a sort of mime-like talent, they could make up things like writers.
“When I come to put down their names, there weren’t many. David O. Selznick
, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, Walter Wanger
, Irving Thalberg
seem to exhaust the list…Ninety per cent of the producers I have known were not bright. They were as slow-witted and unprofessional toward making up a story as stockbrokers might be, or bus drivers. Even after twenty or thirty years of telling writers what and how to write, they were still as ignorant of writing as if they had never encountered the craft.
“Out of the seventy movies I’ve written some ten of them were not entirely waste product. These were Underworld, The Scoundrel, Wuthering Heights, Viva Villa, Scarface, Specter of the Rose, Actors and Sin, Roman Holiday, Spellbound, Nothing Sacred.”
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, and novelist. Called "the Shakespeare of Hollywood", he received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some 70 films and as a prolific storyteller, authored 35 books and created some of the most entertaining screenplays and plays in America. Film historian Richard Corliss
Richard Corliss
Richard Nelson Corliss is a writer for Time magazine who focuses on movies, with the occasional article on music or sports. Corliss is the former editor-in-chief of Film Comment...
called him "the" Hollywood screenwriter, someone who "personified Hollywood itself." The Dictionary of Literary Biography - American Screenwriters calls him "one of the most successful screenwriters in the history of motion pictures."
He was the first screenwriter to receive an Academy Award for Original Screenplay, for the movie Underworld
Underworld (1927 film)
Underworld is a 1927 silent crime film directed by Josef von Sternberg.-Plot:Boisterous gangster kingpin Bull Weed rehabilitates his former lawyer from his alcoholic haze, but complications arise when he falls for Weed's girlfriend.-Cast:* George Bancroft as "Bull" Weed* Evelyn Brent as "Feathers"...
(1927). The number of screenplays he wrote or worked on that are now considered classics is, according to Chicago's Newberry Library
Newberry Library
The Newberry Library is a privately endowed, independent research library for the humanities and social sciences in Chicago, Illinois. Although it is private, non-circulating library, the Newberry Library is free and open to the public...
, "astounding," and included films such as, Scarface
Scarface (1932 film)
Scarface is a 1932 American gangster film starring Paul Muni and George Raft, produced by Howard Hughes, directed by Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson, and written by Ben Hecht based on the 1929 novel of the same name by Armitage Trail...
(1932), The Front Page
The Front Page (1931 film)
The Front Page is a 1931 American comedy film, directed by Lewis Milestone and starring Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien. Based on a Broadway play of the same name, the film was produced by Howard Hughes, written by Bartlett Cormack and Charles Lederer, and distributed by United Artists. The...
, Twentieth Century
Twentieth Century (film)
Twentieth Century is a 1934 American screwball comedy film. Much of the film is set on the 20th Century Limited train as it travels from Chicago to New York. The film was directed by Howard Hawks, stars John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, and features Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns and Edgar Kennedy...
(1934), Barbary Coast
Barbary Coast (film)
Barbary Coast is a period film directed by Howard Hawks. Shot in black-and-white and set in San Francisco during the Gold Rush era, the film combines elements of crime, Western, melodrama and adventure genres, features a wide range of actors, from good-guy Joel McCrea to bad-boy Edward G...
(1935), Nothing Sacred
Nothing Sacred (film)
Nothing Sacred is a 1937 Technicolor screwball comedy film made by Selznick International Pictures and distributed by United Artists. It was directed by William A. Wellman and produced by David O. Selznick, from a screenplay credited to Ben Hecht, based on a story by James H. Street...
(1937), Some Like It Hot
Some Like It Hot (1939 film)
Some Like It Hot is a 1939 comedy film starring Bob Hope, Shirley Ross, and Gene Krupa. The movie was directed by George Archainbaud, and the screenplay was written by Wilkie C. Mahoney and Lewis R. Foster, based on the play The Great Magoo by Ben Hecht and Gene Fowler, which performed briefly on...
, Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind (film)
Gone with the Wind is a 1939 American historical epic film adapted from Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer-winning 1936 novel of the same name. It was produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Victor Fleming from a screenplay by Sidney Howard...
, Gunga Din
Gunga Din (film)
Gunga Din is a 1939 RKO adventure film directed by George Stevens, loosely based on the poem of the same name by Rudyard Kipling, combined with elements of his novel Soldiers Three...
, Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights (1939 film)
Wuthering Heights is a 1939 American black-and-white film directed by William Wyler and produced by Samuel Goldwyn. It is based on the novel, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. The film depicts only sixteen of the novel's thirty-four chapters, eliminating the second generation of characters. The...
, (all 1939), His Girl Friday
His Girl Friday
His Girl Friday is a 1940 American screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks, an adaptation by Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur of the play The Front Page by Hecht and MacArthur...
(1940), Spellbound
Spellbound (1945 film)
Spellbound is a psychological mystery thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1945. It tells the story of the new head of a mental asylum who turns out not to be what he claims. The film stars Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Michael Chekhov and Leo G. Carroll. It is an adaptation by Angus...
(1945), Notorious (1946), Monkey Business
Monkey Business (1952 film)
Monkey Business is a screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, Marilyn Monroe, and Hugh Marlowe. To avoid confusion with the famous Marx Brothers movie of the same name, this film is sometimes referred to as Howard Hawks' Monkey...
, A Farewell to Arms
A Farewell to Arms (1957 film)
A Farewell to Arms is a 1957 American drama film directed by Charles Vidor. The screenplay by Ben Hecht, based in part on a 1930 play by Laurence Stallings, was the second feature film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's 1929 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. It was the last film produced...
(1957), Mutiny on the Bounty
Mutiny on the Bounty (1962 film)
Mutiny on the Bounty is a 1962 film starring Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard based on the novel Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. The film retells the 1789 real-life mutiny aboard HMAV Bounty led by Fletcher Christian against the ship's captain, William Bligh...
(1962), and Casino Royale
Casino Royale (1967 film)
Casino Royale is a 1967 comedy spy film originally produced by Columbia Pictures starring an ensemble cast of directors and actors. It is set as a satire of the James Bond film series and the spy genre, and is loosely based on Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel.The film stars David Niven as the...
(released posthumously, in 1967). He also provided story ideas for such films as Stagecoach (1939). In 1940, he wrote, produced, and directed, Angels Over Broadway
Angels Over Broadway
Angels Over Broadway is a 1940 drama film in which a hustler, a showgirl, and an alcoholic playwright try to help an embezzler win enough money to return what he stole before it is too late....
, which was nominated for Best Screenplay. In total, six of his movie screenplays were nominated for Academy Awards, with two winning.
He became an active Zionist shortly before the Holocaust
The Holocaust
The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...
began in Germany, and as a result wrote articles and plays about the plight of Europe's Jews, such as We Will Never Die in 1943 and A Flag is Born
A Flag is Born
A Flag Is Born was a play promoting the creation of a Jewish State in the ancient land of Israel. It opened on Broadway on September 4, 1946. The cast included Paul Muni, Celia Adler and Marlon Brando. Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter, Ben Hecht, was the playwright; it was directed by...
in 1946. Of his seventy to ninety screenplays, he wrote many anonymously to avoid the British boycott
Boycott
A boycott is an act of voluntarily abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with a person, organization, or country as an expression of protest, usually for political reasons...
of his work in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The boycott was a response to Hecht's active support of paramilitary action against British forces in Palestine (see below), during which time a supply ship to Palestine was named the S.S. Ben Hecht.
He could produce a screenplay in two weeks and, according to his autobiography, never spent more than eight weeks on a script. Yet he was still able to produce mostly rich, well-plotted, and witty screenplays. His scripts included virtually every movie genre: adventures, musicals, and impassioned romances. But ultimately, he was best known for two specific types of film: crime thrillers and screwball comedies. Despite his success, however, he disliked the effect that movies were having on the theater, American cultural standards, and on his own creativity.
Early years
Hecht was born in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, the son of Russian–Jewish
History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union
The vast territories of the Russian Empire at one time hosted the largest populations of Jews in the diaspora. Within these territories the Jewish community flourished and developed many of modern Judaism's most distinctive theological and cultural traditions, while also facing periods of...
immigrants. Hecht’s father, Joseph Hecht, was a garment worker whose specialty was cutting cloth to patterns. He and his future wife, Sarah Swernofski, had immigrated to the Lower East Side from Minsk
Minsk
- Ecological situation :The ecological situation is monitored by Republican Center of Radioactive and Environmental Control .During 2003–2008 the overall weight of contaminants increased from 186,000 to 247,400 tons. The change of gas as industrial fuel to mazut for financial reasons has worsened...
, Belarus
Belarus
Belarus , officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel ,...
, then part of the Russian Empire
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
. The family language was Yiddish. The Hechts married on the Lower East Side
Lower East Side
The Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....
in 1892 and Ben was born the next year.
The family moved to Racine
Racine, Wisconsin
Racine is a city in and the county seat of Racine County, Wisconsin, United States. According to 2008 U.S. Census Bureau estimates, the city had a population of 82,196...
, Wisconsin
Wisconsin
Wisconsin is a U.S. state located in the north-central United States and is part of the Midwest. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, Michigan to the northeast, and Lake Superior to the north. Wisconsin's capital is...
, where Ben attended high school. When Hecht was in his early teens he would spend the summers with an uncle in Chicago. On the road much of the time, his father did not have much effect on Hecht’s childhood, and his mother was busy managing the store outlet in downtown Racine. Film author Scott Siegal wrote, "He was considered a child prodigy at age 10, seemingly on his way to a career as a concert violinist, but two years later was performing as a circus acrobat.".
After graduating from high school in 1910, Hecht moved to Chicago, lived with relatives, and started a career in journalism. At sixteen, he ran away to live permanently in Chicago, and found work as a reporter, first for the Chicago Journal, and later with the Chicago Daily News
Chicago Daily News
The Chicago Daily News was an afternoon daily newspaper published between 1876 and 1978 in Chicago, Illinois.-History:The Daily News was founded by Melville E. Stone, Percy Meggy, and William Dougherty in 1875 and began publishing early the next year...
. He was an excellent reporter who worked on several Chicago papers. After World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, Hecht was sent to cover Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
for the Chicago Daily News. There he wrote his first and most successful novel, Erik Dorn (1921). It was a sensational debut for Hecht as a serious writer.
The 1969 movie, Gaily, Gaily
Gaily, Gaily
Gaily, Gaily is a 1969 comedy film directed by Norman Jewison. It is based on the Autobiographical novel by Ben Hecht and stars Beau Bridges, Melina Mercouri, Brian Keith, and George Kennedy....
, directed by Norman Jewison
Norman Jewison
Norman Frederick Jewison, CC, O.Ont is a Canadian film director, producer, actor and founder of the Canadian Film Centre. Highlights of his directing career include In the Heat of the Night , The Thomas Crown Affair , Fiddler on the Roof , Jesus Christ Superstar , Moonstruck , The Hurricane and The...
and starring Beau Bridges
Beau Bridges
Lloyd Vernet "Beau" Bridges III is an American actor and director.- Early life :Bridges was born in Los Angeles, the son of actor Lloyd Bridges and his college sweetheart, Dorothy Bridges . He was nicknamed "Beau" by his mother and father after Ashley Wilkes's son in Gone with the Wind, the book...
as "Ben Harvey", was based on his life during his early years working as a reporter in Chicago, and was nominated for three Oscars. The story was taken from a portion of his autobiography, A Child of the Century.
Journalist
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
for the Chicago Daily News
Chicago Daily News
The Chicago Daily News was an afternoon daily newspaper published between 1876 and 1978 in Chicago, Illinois.-History:The Daily News was founded by Melville E. Stone, Percy Meggy, and William Dougherty in 1875 and began publishing early the next year...
. According to Siegel, "Besides being a war reporter, he was noted for being a tough crime reporter while also becoming known in Chicago literary circles.".
In 1921, Hecht inaugurated a Daily News column called One Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago. While it lasted, the column was enormously influential. His editor, Henry Justin Smith, later said it represented a new concept in journalism:
- "the idea that just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often flatly unimaginatively told, lay life; that in this urban life there dwelt the stuff of literature, not hidden in remote places, either, but walking the downtown streets, peering from the windows of sky scrapers, sunning itself in parks and boulevards. He was going to be its interpreter. His was to be the lens throwing city life into new colors, his the microscope revealing its contortions in life and death."
While at the Chicago Daily News, Hecht famously broke the 1921 "Ragged Stranger Murder Case" story, about the murder of Carl Wanderer
Carl Wanderer
Carl Otto Wanderer was a murderer famous for what became known as "The Case of the Ragged Stranger", wherein he murdered his wife Ruth, and a drifter named Al Watson, in a bizarre plot to kill his wife so he could be with his homosexual lover, known only as "James"...
's wife, which led to the trial and execution of war hero Carl Wanderer. In Chicago, he also met and befriended Maxwell Bodenheim
Maxwell Bodenheim
Maxwell Bodenheim was an American poet and novelist who was known as the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians. His writing brought him international fame during the Jazz Age of the 1920s.-Biography:...
, an American poet and novelist, known as the King of Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...
Bohemians, and with whom he became a lifelong friend.
After concluding One Thousand and One Afternoons, Hecht went on to produce novels, plays, screenplays, and memoirs, but none of these eclipsed his early success in finding the stuff of literature in city life. Recalling that period, Hecht wrote, "I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops. I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me."
Playwright
He began writing plays beginning with a series of one-acts in 1914. His first full-length play was The Egotist, and was produced in New York in 1922. While living in Chicago, he met fellow reporter Charles MacArthurCharles MacArthur
Charles Gordon MacArthur was an American playwright and screenwriter.-Biography:Charles MacArthur was the second youngest of seven children born to stern evangelist William Telfer MacArthur and Georgiana Welsted MacArthur. He early developed a passion for reading...
and together they moved to New York to collaborate on their play, The Front Page
The Front Page
The Front Page is a hit Broadway comedy about tabloid newspaper reporters on the police beat, written by one-time Chicago reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur which was first produced in 1928.-Synopsis:...
. It was widely acclaimed and had a successful run on Broadway of 281 performances, beginning August,1928. In 1931 it was turned into a successful film which was nominated for three Oscars.
Novelist and short-story writer
Besides working as reporter in Chicago, "he also contributed to literary magazines including the Little Review. After World War IWorld War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
he was sent by the Chicago Daily News to Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...
to witness the revolutionary movements, which gave him the material for his first novel, Erik Dorn (1921). ... A daily column he wrote, 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, was later collected into a book, and brought Hecht fame." These works enhanced his reputation in the literary scene as a reporter, columnist, short story writer, and novelist. After leaving the News in 1923 he started his own newspaper The Chicago Literary Times.
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....
, Adelaide
Adelaide
Adelaide is the capital city of South Australia and the fifth-largest city in Australia. Adelaide has an estimated population of more than 1.2 million...
, Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
, and Verlaine
Verlaine
Verlaine is a municipality of Belgium. It lies in the country's Walloon Region and Province of Liege. On January 1, 2006 Verlaine had a total population of 3,507. The total area is 24.21 km² which gives a population density of 145 inhabitants per km². The municipality contains the villages...
, and developed a style that was extraordinary and imaginative. The use of metaphor
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...
, image
Image
An image is an artifact, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject—usually a physical object or a person.-Characteristics:...
ry, and vivid phrases made his writing distinct... again and again Hecht showed an uncanny ability to picture the strange jumble of events in strokes as vivid and touching as the brushmarks of a novelist."
"Ben Hecht was the enfant terrible of American letters in the first half of the twentieth century," wrote author Sanford Sternlicht. "If Hecht was consistently opposed to anything, it was to censorship
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
of literature
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
, art, and film by either the government or self-appointed guardians of public morality." He adds, "Even though he never attended college, Hecht became a successful novelist, playwright, journalist, and screenwriter. His star has sunk below the horizon now, but in his own lifetime Hecht became one of the most famous American literary and entertainment figures..."
Eventually Hecht became associated with the writers Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson was an American novelist and short story writer. His most enduring work is the short story sequence Winesburg, Ohio. Writers he has influenced include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, J. D. Salinger, and Amos Oz.-Early life:Anderson was born in Clyde, Ohio,...
, Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of...
, Maxwell Bodenheim
Maxwell Bodenheim
Maxwell Bodenheim was an American poet and novelist who was known as the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians. His writing brought him international fame during the Jazz Age of the 1920s.-Biography:...
, Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg
Carl Sandburg was an American writer and editor, best known for his poetry. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two for his poetry and another for a biography of Abraham Lincoln. H. L. Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every pulse-beat."-Biography:Sandburg was born in Galesburg,...
, and Pascal Covici
Pascal Covici
Pascal Avram "Pat" Covici was a Romanian Jewish-American book publisher and editor.- Early life :Pascal Avram Covici, known to his friends as "Pat," was born November 4, 1885 in Botoşani, Romania. He was the son of vintner Wolf Covici and Schfra Barish...
. He knew Margaret Anderson and contributed to her Little Review, the magazine of the Chicago "literary renaissance," and to Smart Set.
A Child of the Century
In 1954 Hecht published his autobiography, A Child of the Century, which, according to literary critic Robert Schmuhl, "received such extensive critical acclaim that his literary reputation improved markedly during the last decade of his life... Hecht's vibrant and candid memoir of more than six hundred pages restored him to the stature of a serious and significant American writer." Novelist Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow
Saul Bellow was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts...
commented about the book for the New York Times: "His manners are not always nice, but then nice manners do not always make interesting autobiographies, and this autobiography has the merit of being intensely interesting...If he is occasionally slick, he is also independent, forthright and original. Among the pussycats who write of social issues today he roars like an old-fashioned lion."
Ghostwriting Marilyn Monroe's biography
Besides working on novels and short stories (see book list), he has been credited with ghostwriting books, including Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe was an American actress, singer, model and showgirl who became a major sex symbol, starring in a number of commercially successful motion pictures during the 1950s....
's autobiography
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
My Story. "The reprint of Marilyn Monroe's memoir, My Story, in the year 2000, by Cooper Square Press, correctly credits Ben Hecht as an author, ending a period of almost 50 years in which Hecht's role was denied...Hecht himself publicly denied writing it until much later..."
According to Monroe biographer Sarah Churchwell, Monroe was "persuaded to capitalize on her newfound celebrity by beginning an autobiography. It was born out of a collaboration with journalist and screenwriter Ben Hecht, hired as a ghostwriter ..." Churchwell adds that the truths in her story were highly selective. "Hecht reported to his editor during the interviews that he was sometimes sure Marilyn was fabricating. He explained, 'When I say lying, I mean she isn’t telling the truth. I don’t think so much that she is trying to deceive me as that she is a fantasizer.'"
Screenwriter
Richard Corliss
Richard Nelson Corliss is a writer for Time magazine who focuses on movies, with the occasional article on music or sports. Corliss is the former editor-in-chief of Film Comment...
writes that "Ben Hecht was the Hollywood screenwriter...[and] it can be said without too much exaggeration that Hecht personifies Hollywood itself." Movie columnist Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. Earlier in her career, her work appeared in City Lights, McCall's and The New Republic....
added that "between them, Hecht and Jules Furthman
Jules Furthman
Jules Furthman was a magazine and newspaper writer before working as a screenwriter.Born in Chicago, Illinois, during World War I he wrote under the name "Stephen Fox." Furthman wrote screenplays for a number of important or popular films, including: The Docks of New York , Thunderbolt , Merely...
wrote most of the best American talkies." His movie career can be defined by about twenty credited screenplays he wrote for Hawks, Hitchcock, Hathaway, Lubitsch, Wellman, Sternberg, and himself. He wrote many of those with his two regular collaborators, Charles MacArthur
Charles MacArthur
Charles Gordon MacArthur was an American playwright and screenwriter.-Biography:Charles MacArthur was the second youngest of seven children born to stern evangelist William Telfer MacArthur and Georgiana Welsted MacArthur. He early developed a passion for reading...
and Charles Lederer
Charles Lederer
Charles Lederer was a prolific and well-connected American film writer and director of the 30s to the 60s, from a prominent theatrical family with close ties to the Hearst dynasty.-Early life:...
.
While living in New York in 1926, he received a telegram from screenwriter friend Herman J. Mankiewicz
Herman J. Mankiewicz
Herman Jacob Mankiewicz was an American screenwriter, who, with Orson Welles, wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane . Earlier, he was the Berlin correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the drama critic for The New York Times and The New Yorker. Alexander Woollcott, said that Herman Mankiewicz was...
, who had recently moved to Los Angeles
Los Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
. "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots", it read. "Don't let this get around." As a writer in need of money, he traveled to Hollywood as Mankiewicz suggested.
Working in Hollywood
He arrived in Los Angeles and began his career at the beginning of the sound era by writing the story for Josef von Sternberg
Josef von Sternberg
Josef von Sternberg — born Jonas Sternberg — was an Austrian-American film director. He is particularly noted for his distinctive mise en scène, use of lighting and soft lens, and seven-film collaboration with actress Marlene Dietrich.-Youth:Von Sternberg was born Jonas Sternberg to a Jewish...
's gangster movie, Underworld
Underworld (1927 film)
Underworld is a 1927 silent crime film directed by Josef von Sternberg.-Plot:Boisterous gangster kingpin Bull Weed rehabilitates his former lawyer from his alcoholic haze, but complications arise when he falls for Weed's girlfriend.-Cast:* George Bancroft as "Bull" Weed* Evelyn Brent as "Feathers"...
, in 1927. For that first screenplay and story he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in Hollywood's first Academy award ceremony. Soon afterward, he became the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood..." Hecht spent from two to twelve weeks in Hollywood each year, "during which he earned enough money (his record was $100,000 in one month, for two screenplays) to live on for the rest of the year in New York, where he did what he considered his serious writing," writes film historian Carol Easton. Nonetheless, later in his career, "he was a writer who liked to think that his genius had been stifled by Hollywood and by its dreadful habit of giving him so much money."
Yet his income was as much a result of his skill as a writer as well as his early jobs with newspapers. As film historians Mast and Kawin wrote, "The newspaper reporters often seemed like gangsters who had accidentally ended up behind a typewriter rather than a tommy gun; they talked and acted as rough as the crooks their assignments forced them to cover...It is no accident that Ben Hecht, the greatest screenwriter of rapid-fire, flavorful tough talk as well as a major comic playwright, wrote gangster pictures, prison pictures, and newspaper pictures."
Hecht became one of Hollywood's most prolific screenwriters, able to write a full screenplay in two to eight weeks. According to Samuel Goldwyn
Samuel Goldwyn
Samuel Goldwyn was an American film producer, and founding contributor executive of several motion picture studios.-Biography:...
biographer Carol Easton, in 1931, with his writing partner Charles MacArthur
Charles MacArthur
Charles Gordon MacArthur was an American playwright and screenwriter.-Biography:Charles MacArthur was the second youngest of seven children born to stern evangelist William Telfer MacArthur and Georgiana Welsted MacArthur. He early developed a passion for reading...
, he "knocked out The Unholy Garden in twelve hours. Hecht subsequently received a fan letter from producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr.:
- 'After reading your magnificent script, Mr. Goldwyn and I both wish to go on record with the statement that if The Unholy Garden isn't the finest motion picture Samuel Goldwyn has ever produced, the fault will be entirely ours. You have done your part superbly." It was produced exactly as written, and "became one of the biggest, yet funniest, bombs ever made by a studio."
Censorship, profit, and art
Despite his monetary success, however, Hecht always kept Hollywood at arms's length. According to film historian Gregory Black, "he did not consider his work for the movies serioius art; it was more a means of replenishing his bank account. When his work was finished, he retreated to New York."
At least part of the reason for this was due to the industry's system of censorship
Censorship
thumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
. Black writes, "as Mankiewicz, Selznick, and Hecht knew all too well, much of the blame for the failure of the movies to deal more frankly and honestly with life lay with a rigid censorship imposed on the industry . . . [and] on the content of films during its golden era of studio production." Because the costs of production and distribution were so high, the primary "goal of the studios was profit, not art. . .[and] fearful of losing any segment of their audiences, the studios either carefully avoided controversial topics or presented them in a way that evaded larger issues," thereby creating only 'harmless entertainment' ".
According to historian David Thomson, "to their own minds, Herman Mankiewicz and Ben Hecht both died morose and frustrated. Neither of them had written the great books they believed possible."
with Howard Hawks
In an interview with director Howard Hawks
Howard Hawks
Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era...
, with whom Hecht worked on many films, Scott Breivold elicited comments on the way they often worked:
- Breivold. Could you explain how the day-to-day writing goes on a script?
- Hawks. "Well, when Hecht and MacArthur and I used to work on a script, we’d sit in a room and work for two hours and then we’d play backgammon for an hour. Then we’d start again and one of us would be one character and one would be another character. We’d read our lines of dialogue and the whole idea was to try to stump the other people, to see if they could think of something crazier than you could."
with David O. Selznick
According to fim historian Virginia Wexman, "David Selznick had a flair for the dramatic, and no one knew that better than Ben Hecht. The two collaborated on some of Hollywood’s biggest hits – movies like Gone With the Wind and Notorious and Duel in the Sun – and often enough the making of those films was as rife with conflict as the films themselves..."
Nothing Sacred
Nothing Sacred (film)
Nothing Sacred is a 1937 Technicolor screwball comedy film made by Selznick International Pictures and distributed by United Artists. It was directed by William A. Wellman and produced by David O. Selznick, from a screenplay credited to Ben Hecht, based on a story by James H. Street...
is probably the "most famous of all the Carole Lombard
Carole Lombard
Carole Lombard was an American actress. She was particularly noted for her comedic roles in the screwball comedies of the 1930s...
films next to My Man Godfrey
My Man Godfrey
My Man Godfrey is a 1936 American screwball comedy film directed by Gregory La Cava. The screenplay was written by Morrie Ryskind, with uncredited contributions by La Cava, based on "1101 Park Avenue", a short story by Eric Hatch. The story concerns a socialite who hires a derelict to be her...
," wrote movie historian James Harvey. And it impressed people at the time with its evident ambition ... "and Selznick determined to make the classiest of all screwball comedies, turned to Lombard as a necessity, but also to Ben Hecht, nearly the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood at the time, especially for comedy. ... it was also the first screwball comedy to lay apparent claim to larger satiric meanings, to make scathing observations about American life and society."
In an interview with Irene Selznick, ex-wife of producer David O. Selznick
David O. Selznick
David O. Selznick was an American film producer. He is best known for having produced Gone with the Wind and Rebecca , both of which earned him an Oscar for Best Picture.-Early years:...
, she discussed the other leading screenwriters of that time:
- "They all aspired to be Ben. The resourcefulness of his mind, his vitality were so enormous. His knowledge. His talent and ambition. He could tear through things, and he tore through life. They'd see this prodigious output of Ben's, and they'd think, 'Oh, hell, I'm a bum.' I think it must have been devastating. Ben did it to MacArthurCharles MacArthurCharles Gordon MacArthur was an American playwright and screenwriter.-Biography:Charles MacArthur was the second youngest of seven children born to stern evangelist William Telfer MacArthur and Georgiana Welsted MacArthur. He early developed a passion for reading...
, who died in time to save his reputation. And I'd hate to have been Herman [Mankiewicz], caught between KaufmanGeorge S. KaufmanGeorge Simon Kaufman was an American playwright, theatre director and producer, humorist, and drama critic. In addition to comedies and political satire, he wrote several musicals, notably for the Marx Brothers...
and Hecht."
with Ernst Lubitsch
According to James Harvey, Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch was a German-born film director. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch."In 1947 he received an Honorary Academy Award for his...
felt uneasy in the world of playwright Noel Coward
Noël Coward
Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy...
. "If Coward could write his play for three particular actors, he reasoned to an interviewer, why couldn’t it be rewritten for three others? It was at this point … that he turned to Ben Hecht...to work with him on the screenplay for Design for Living
Design for Living (film)
Design for Living is a 1933 American comedy film produced and directed by Ernst Lubitsch. The screenplay by Ben Hecht is based on the 1933 play of the same name by Noël Coward. It concerns a trio of artistic Americans in Paris and their complicated three-way relationship.The film stars Fredric...
." It was the first and only Lubitsch-Hecht collaboration. Harvey adds, "Though Lubitsch must have been reassured by Hecht’s taking the job. No writer in Hollywood had better credentials in the tough, slangy, specifically American style that Lubitsch wanted to impart to the Coward play. And together they transformed it."
Styles of writing
According to Siegel, "The talkie era put writers like Hecht at a premium because they could write dialogue in the quirky, idiosyncratic style of the common man. Hecht, in particular, was wonderful with slang, and he peppered his films with the argot of the streets. He also had a lively sense of humor and an uncanny ability to ground even the most outragious stories successfully with credible, fast-paced plots." "Ben Hecht," his friend Budd SchulbergBudd Schulberg
Budd Schulberg was an American screenwriter, television producer, novelist and sports writer. He was known for his 1941 novel, What Makes Sammy Run?, his 1947 novel The Harder They Fall, his 1954 Academy-award-winning screenplay for On the Waterfront, and his 1957 screenplay for A Face in the...
wrote many years ago, "seemed the personification of the writer at the top of his game, the top of his world, not gnawing at doubting himself as great writers were said to do, but with every word and every gesture indicating the animal pleasure he took in writing well."
"Movies," Hecht was to recall, "were seldom written. In 1927 they were yelled into existence in conferences that kept going in saloons, brothels, and all-night poker games. Movie sets roared with arguments and organ music."
He was best known for two specific and contrasting types of film: crime thrillers and screwball comedies. Among crime thrillers, Hecht was responsible for such films as The Unholy Night
The Unholy Night
The Unholy Night is a 1929 mystery film directed by Lionel Barrymore, starring Ernest Torrence and featuring Boris Karloff.-Cast:* Ernest Torrence - Dr...
(1929), the classic Scarface
Scarface (1932 film)
Scarface is a 1932 American gangster film starring Paul Muni and George Raft, produced by Howard Hughes, directed by Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson, and written by Ben Hecht based on the 1929 novel of the same name by Armitage Trail...
(1932), and Hitchcock's Notorious. Among his comedies, there were The Front Page
The Front Page (1931 film)
The Front Page is a 1931 American comedy film, directed by Lewis Milestone and starring Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien. Based on a Broadway play of the same name, the film was produced by Howard Hughes, written by Bartlett Cormack and Charles Lederer, and distributed by United Artists. The...
, which led to many remakes, Noel Coward
Noël Coward
Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy...
's Design for Living
Design for Living (film)
Design for Living is a 1933 American comedy film produced and directed by Ernst Lubitsch. The screenplay by Ben Hecht is based on the 1933 play of the same name by Noël Coward. It concerns a trio of artistic Americans in Paris and their complicated three-way relationship.The film stars Fredric...
(1933), Twentieth Century
Twentieth Century (film)
Twentieth Century is a 1934 American screwball comedy film. Much of the film is set on the 20th Century Limited train as it travels from Chicago to New York. The film was directed by Howard Hawks, stars John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, and features Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns and Edgar Kennedy...
, Nothing Sacred
Nothing Sacred (film)
Nothing Sacred is a 1937 Technicolor screwball comedy film made by Selznick International Pictures and distributed by United Artists. It was directed by William A. Wellman and produced by David O. Selznick, from a screenplay credited to Ben Hecht, based on a story by James H. Street...
, and Howard Hawks
Howard Hawks
Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era...
' Monkey Business
Monkey Business (1952 film)
Monkey Business is a screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, Marilyn Monroe, and Hugh Marlowe. To avoid confusion with the famous Marx Brothers movie of the same name, this film is sometimes referred to as Howard Hawks' Monkey...
(1952).
Film historian Richard Corliss wrote, "it is his crisp, frenetic, sensational prose and dialogue style that elevates his work above that of the dozens of other reporters who streamed west to cover and exploit Hollywood's biggest 'story': the talkie revolution.
Married life
He married Marie Armstrong in 1915, when he was 21 years of age, and had a daughter, Edwina, who became actress Edwina Armstrong. He was divorced a decade later by 1925, soon married Rose Caylor that same year, and remained married until Hecht's death in 1964. In 1943, they had a daughter Jenny Hecht, who also became an actress, but died of a drug overdose in March 1971, at age 27.Civil rights activism
According to Hecht historian Florice Whyte Kovan, he became active in promoting civil rightsCivil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
early in his career. "...in the early 1920s, Hecht organized campaigns against the Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...
, whose lynchings of minorities, primarily blacks, terrorized the American South and North... Artists and writers joined the effort, blending civil rights into the arts and literary scene...
"Hecht wrote enough stories about black/white dynamics to form a small collection, including To Bert Williams
Bert Williams
Egbert Austin "Bert" Williams was one of the preeminent entertainers of the Vaudeville era and one of the most popular comedians for all audiences of his time. He was by far the best-selling black recording artist before 1920...
, a richly symbolic obituary to the eminent vaudevillian, the thought provoking The Miracle...In the same period, circa May–June 1923, Hecht ... collaborated on a musical with Dave Payton (Peyton), jazz pianist and music critic for the black newspaper the Chicago Defender
Chicago Defender
The Chicago Defender is a Chicago based newspaper founded in 1905 by an African American for primarily African American readers.In just three years from 1919–1922 the Defender also attracted the writing talents of Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks....
...He broke taboos by publishing a regular column, Black-belt Shadows, about Chicago and broader AfroAmerica by young William Moore -- with the then-daring editorial note: 'This column is conducted by a Negro journalist.' A factor in his willingness to work with blacks on occasion was his first playwriting experience: His collaborator was a young black student.
"Hecht film stories featuring black characters included Hallelujah, I'm a Bum
Hallelujah, I'm a Bum
"Hallelujah, I'm a Bum" is an American folk song that responds with humorous sarcasm to unhelpful moralizing about the circumstance of being a hobo....
, co-starring Edgar Conner as Al Jolson
Al Jolson
Al Jolson was an American singer, comedian and actor. In his heyday, he was dubbed "The World's Greatest Entertainer"....
's sidekick in a politically savvy rhymed dialogue over Richard Rodgers
Richard Rodgers
Richard Charles Rodgers was an American composer of music for more than 900 songs and for 43 Broadway musicals. He also composed music for films and television. He is best known for his songwriting partnerships with the lyricists Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II...
music." (Jolson, a noted blackface performer and star of The Jazz Singer
The Jazz Singer (1927 film)
The Jazz Singer is a 1927 American musical film. The first feature-length motion picture with synchronized dialogue sequences, its release heralded the commercial ascendance of the "talkies" and the decline of the silent film era. Produced by Warner Bros. with its Vitaphone sound-on-disc system,...
, was also active in promoting racial equality on the Broadway stage.)
"Hecht's most important race film historically was the Frank Capra
Frank Capra
Frank Russell Capra was a Sicilian-born American film director. He emigrated to the U.S. when he was six, and eventually became a creative force behind major award-winning films during the 1930s and 1940s...
message film The Negro Soldier
The Negro Soldier
The United States Army's First Motion Picture Unit created the documentary The Negro Soldier in 1944 during World War II. The film was produced by Frank Capra as a follow up to his successful film series Why We Fight. The army used this film as a means of propaganda to convince African Americans...
, a feature length tribute shown to the armed forces and civilians during World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
."
Supporting allies during WWII
Hecht was among a number of signers of a formal statement, issued in July, 1941, calling for the "utmost material assistance by our government to EnglandEngland
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
and China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
." Among those who signed were former Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
winners in science, and others persons eminent in education, literature and the arts. It advocated "the protection of civil liberties and the rights of labor, ... the elimination of all forms of racial and religious discrimination from our public and private life ... [and] the world-wide defense of human liberty ... There can be no victory over Hitlerlism abroad if democracy is destroyed at home."
Later that year, he had his first musical collaboration with symphonic composer Ferde Grofe
Ferde Grofé
Ferde Grofé was a prominent American composer, arranger and pianist. During the 1920s and 1930s, he went by the name Ferdie Grofé.-Early life:...
on their patriotic cantata Uncle Sam Stands Up.
Jewish activism
Hecht claimed that he had never experienced anti-Semitism in his life, and claimed to have had little to do with Judaism, but nevertheless "was drawn back to the Lower East SideLower East Side
The Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....
late in life and lived for a while on Henry Street, where he could absorb the energy and social consciousness of the ghetto," wrote author Sanford Sternlicht. In later years, before World War II began, Hecht "took on a ten year commitment to publicize the atrocities befalling his own religious minority, the Jews of Europe and the quest for survivors, to find a permanent home in the Middle East." In 1943, during the midst of the Holocaust, he predicted, in a widely published article in Reader's Digest magazine, "Of these 6,000,000 Jews [of Europe], almost a third have already been massacred by Germans, Romanians and Hungarians, and the most conservative of scorekeepers estimate that before the war ends at least another third will have been done to death."
Also in 1943, "out of frustration over American policy and outrage at Hollywood's fear of offending its European markets," he organized and wrote a pageant, We Will Never Die, which was produced by Billy Rose
Billy Rose
William "Billy" Rose was an American impresario, theatrical showman and lyricist. He is credited with many famous songs, notably "Me and My Shadow" , "It Happened in Monterey" and "It's Only a Paper Moon"...
and Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch
Ernst Lubitsch was a German-born film director. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch."In 1947 he received an Honorary Academy Award for his...
and with the help of composer Kurt Weill
Kurt Weill
Kurt Julian Weill was a German-Jewish composer, active from the 1920s, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht...
and staging by Moss Hart
Moss Hart
Moss Hart was an American playwright and theatre director, best known for his interpretations of musical theater on Broadway.-Early years:...
. The pageant was performed at Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden, often abbreviated as MSG and known colloquially as The Garden, is a multi-purpose indoor arena in the New York City borough of Manhattan and located at 8th Avenue, between 31st and 33rd Streets, situated on top of Pennsylvania Station.Opened on February 11, 1968, it is the...
for two shows in front of 40,000 people in March, 1943. It then traveled nationwide, including a performance at the Hollywood Bowl. Hecht was disappointed nonetheless. As Weill noted afterwards, ""The pageant has accomplished nothing. Actually, all we have done is make a lot of Jews cry, which is not a unique accomplishment."
Ben Hecht's activism began when he met Peter Bergson. Hecht wrote in his book Perfidy
Perfidy (book)
Perfidy is a book written by Ben Hecht in 1961. The book details the events surrounding the Rudolf Kastner trial.The book draws heavily on transcripts from the trial, and draws the conclusion that Kastner collaborated with the Nazis and then later lied about it under oath...
that he used to be a scriptwriter until his meeting with Bergson, when he accidentally bumped into history - i.e. the burning need to do anything possible to save the doomed Jews of Europe (paraphrase from Perfidy). After meeting Bergson, Hecht dedicated himself to working with his rescue group, and after the war ended he continued work for the establishment of the State of Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
. He wrote the screenplay for the Bergson Group’s production of A Flag is Born
A Flag is Born
A Flag Is Born was a play promoting the creation of a Jewish State in the ancient land of Israel. It opened on Broadway on September 4, 1946. The cast included Paul Muni, Celia Adler and Marlon Brando. Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter, Ben Hecht, was the playwright; it was directed by...
, which opened on September 5, 1946 at the Alvin Playhouse in New York City.
The play starred Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando, Jr. was an American movie star and political activist. "Unchallenged as the most important actor in modern American Cinema" according to the St...
and Paul Muni
Paul Muni
Paul Muni was an Austrian-Hungarian-born American stage and film actor...
during its various productions. The proceeds from the play were used to purchase a ship that was renamed the S.S. Ben Hecht, which carried 900 refugees to Palestine in March, 1947. The British Navy captured the ship after it docked and sent 600 of its passengers to detention camps in Cyprus
Cyprus
Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...
. The S.S. Ben Hecht later became the flagship of the Israeli Navy.
Six months after the establishment of Israel by the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
, Bergson and Hecht officially dissolved the organization which produced the fund-raising play, followed by a dinner in New York City where Menachem Begin
Menachem Begin
' was a politician, founder of Likud and the sixth Prime Minister of the State of Israel. Before independence, he was the leader of the Zionist militant group Irgun, the Revisionist breakaway from the larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. He proclaimed a revolt, on 1 February 1944,...
appeared, saying, "I believe that my people, liberated and re-assembled in its country, will contribute its full share toward the progress of all mankind ... [and predicted] that all of Palestine eventually would be free and that peace and brotherhood would prevail among Arabs and Jews alike."
Thanks to his fund-raising, speeches, and jawboning, Sternlicht writes, "Ben Hecht did more to help Jewish refugees from the Holocaust and to ensure the survival of the nascent State of Israel than any other American Jew in the twentieth century". As much as anything, it was the abiding love of his Jewish parent and Rose Hecht that motivated the writer to become arguably "the most effective propagandist the Jewish state ever had." In 1964, at Hecht’s funeral service at Temple Rodeph Shalom in New York City, among the eulogists was Menachem Begin
Menachem Begin
' was a politician, founder of Likud and the sixth Prime Minister of the State of Israel. Before independence, he was the leader of the Zionist militant group Irgun, the Revisionist breakaway from the larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. He proclaimed a revolt, on 1 February 1944,...
, the future Prime Minister of Israel.
Blacklisted in the UK
From 1948 to 1951, Hecht's films were blacklist
Blacklist
A blacklist is a list or register of entities who, for one reason or another, are being denied a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition. As a verb, to blacklist can mean to deny someone work in a particular field, or to ostracize a person from a certain social circle...
ed in the UK by a "concerted action by English film exhibitors to boycott" films written by him. This was a result of "his intemperate utterances on the Palestine problem," according to one source. In May 1947, for instance, ten months after Irgun, the Jewish insurgency organisation led by Begin, had responded to British arrests by blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, British military headquarters at the time, killing 91 people, including Arabs and Jews as well as Britons, Hecht addressed Jewish militants thus: 'Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.' His films were banned in the UK, and of the ones shown, his name was removed from the credits.
Notable screenplays
Underworld (1927)Underworld
Underworld (1927 film)
Underworld is a 1927 silent crime film directed by Josef von Sternberg.-Plot:Boisterous gangster kingpin Bull Weed rehabilitates his former lawyer from his alcoholic haze, but complications arise when he falls for Weed's girlfriend.-Cast:* George Bancroft as "Bull" Weed* Evelyn Brent as "Feathers"...
was the story of a petty hoodlum with political pull; it was based on a real Chicago gangster Hecht knew. "The film began the gangster film genre that became popular in the early 1930s." And along with Scarface, "were the alpha and omega of Hollywood's first gangster craze." In it, he "manages both to congratulate journalism for its importance and to chastise it for its chicanery, by underlining the newspapers' complicity in promoting the underworld image."
"Like so many of his films, Underworld and Scarface are 'stories' that ace-reporter Hecht loved to cover, as much for the larger-than-life qualities of his headliners as for the enormity of their crimes. Love-hate ... fascination-revulsion ... expose'-glorification ... these are the polarities that make Hecht's best films deliciously ambiguous." "Hecht's introduction, which is nothing if not moody and Sandburgian, describes 'A great city in the dead of night - streets lonely, moon-flooded - buildings empty as the cliff-dwellings of a forgotten age."
Hecht was noted for confronting producers and directors when he wasn't satisfied with the way they used his scripts. For this film, at one point he demanded that its director, Josef von Sternberg
Josef von Sternberg
Josef von Sternberg — born Jonas Sternberg — was an Austrian-American film director. He is particularly noted for his distinctive mise en scène, use of lighting and soft lens, and seven-film collaboration with actress Marlene Dietrich.-Youth:Von Sternberg was born Jonas Sternberg to a Jewish...
remove his name from the credits since Sternberg unilaterally changed one scene. Afterwards, however, he relented and took credit for the film's story, which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay - the first year the awards were presented.
The Front Page (1931)
After contributing to the original stories for a number of films, he worked without credit on the first film version of his original 1928 play The Front Page
The Front Page (1931 film)
The Front Page is a 1931 American comedy film, directed by Lewis Milestone and starring Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien. Based on a Broadway play of the same name, the film was produced by Howard Hughes, written by Bartlett Cormack and Charles Lederer, and distributed by United Artists. The...
. It was produced by Howard Hughes
Howard Hughes
Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. was an American business magnate, investor, aviator, engineer, film producer, director, and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest people in the world...
and directed by Lewis Milestone
Lewis Milestone
Lewis Milestone was a Russian-American motion picture director. He is known for directing Two Arabian Knights and All Quiet on the Western Front , both of which received Academy Awards for Best Director...
in 1931. James Harvey writes, "it is Hecht and MacArthur’s Chicago ... that counts most deeply in the imagination of Hollywood. And their play, the first of the great newspaper comedies, did more to define the tone and style, the look and the sound of Hollywood comedy than any other work of its time."
Of the original play, theater producer and writer Jed Harris
Jed Harris
Jed Harris was a renowned Austrian-American theater producer and director, and writer of film.-Personal history:...
writes, "...here is a play which reflects miraculously the real as well as the literary personalities of the playwrights. Every line of it glows with a demoniacal humor, sordid, insolent and mischievous to the point of down right perversity, in which one instantly recognizes the heroic comic spirit of its authors... Both Hecht and MacArthur owe their literary origins to the newspapers of Chicago. Famous crime reporters, their talents were first cradled in the recounting of great exploits in arson, rape, murder, gang war and municipal politics. Out of a welter of jail breaks, hangings, floods and whore-house raidings, they have gathered the rich, savory characters who disport themselves on the stage to Times Square Theatre."
Scarface (1932)
After ushering in the beginning of the gangster film with Underworld, his next film became one of the best films of that genre. Scarface
Scarface (1932 film)
Scarface is a 1932 American gangster film starring Paul Muni and George Raft, produced by Howard Hughes, directed by Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson, and written by Ben Hecht based on the 1929 novel of the same name by Armitage Trail...
was directed by Howard Hawks
Howard Hawks
Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era...
, with "Hecht the wordsmith and Hawks the engineer...", who became "one of the few directors with whom Hecht enjoyed working." It starred Paul Muni
Paul Muni
Paul Muni was an Austrian-Hungarian-born American stage and film actor...
playing the role of an Al Capone
Al Capone
Alphonse Gabriel "Al" Capone was an American gangster who led a Prohibition-era crime syndicate. The Chicago Outfit, which subsequently became known as the "Capones", was dedicated to smuggling and bootlegging liquor, and other illegal activities such as prostitution, in Chicago from the early...
-like gangster. "Scarface's all-but-suffocating vitality is a kind of cinematic version of tabloid prose at its best."
The story of how Scarface came to be written represents Hecht's writing style in those days. Film historian Max Wilk interviewed Leyland Hayward, an independent literary agent, who, in 1931, managed to convince Hecht that a young oil tycoon in Texas named Howard Hughes
Howard Hughes
Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. was an American business magnate, investor, aviator, engineer, film producer, director, and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest people in the world...
wanted him to write the screenplay to his first book. Hayward wrote about that period:
- "So I went back to Hughes, and told him I’d been able to persuade Hecht to do his script; I told him Ben’s terms, - $1,000 per day - and Howard didn’t blink an eye. He nodded, and said 'Okay-it’s a deal. But you tell Hecht I want a real tough shoot-‘em up script that'll knock the audience out of its seats, okay?'
- "So Ben went to work,” added Hayward. Hayward was to receive 10% of Hecht’s fees as his commission. "He was a hell of a fast writer – sometimes too fast. I didn’t even know how fast he could go ... At the end of the first day I went back to Ben’s house. There he was, typing away. ... I said 'Ben – please slow down.' Over the next few days, 'while watching the accumulated pages of Hecht’s script growing higher and higher, 'I couldn’t slow the guy down!' sighed Hayward, who only made his commission for each day Hecht worked.
- "I came by his home the next day... 'I’ve got an idea. I’m going to finish this damn thing tomorrow,' Ben told me. 'Ben—for God’s sake!' I said. 'Can’t you slow down a little? Hughes isn’t interested in you setting some sort of a speed record for writing!'"
- But it was as if young Hayward had set out to flag down an army tank. Nothing stopped Hecht. On the night of the ninth day, Hayward arrived with his daily payment from Hughes, to find Hecht lounging in a chair, enjoying a highball.
- "Hecht waved at his stack of manuscript. 'Done,' he announced. 'Finished the damn thing.'
- "Nine thousand dollars – for the screenplay of Scarface? sighed Hayward. ... Hughes was tickled with Ben’s script; he showed it to Howard HawksHoward HawksHoward Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era...
. Hawks loved it, and then they picked up this wonderful young actor from New York, Paul MuniPaul MuniPaul Muni was an Austrian-Hungarian-born American stage and film actor...
, to play the lead. The picture went out and cleaned up – made a bundle for Hughes … And if old Ben really outsmarted himself on that one ... he didn’t care. He was on to something else. Ben was always on to something else."
Twentieth Century (1934)
For his next film, Twentieth Century
Twentieth Century (film)
Twentieth Century is a 1934 American screwball comedy film. Much of the film is set on the 20th Century Limited train as it travels from Chicago to New York. The film was directed by Howard Hawks, stars John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, and features Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns and Edgar Kennedy...
, he wrote the screenplay in collaboration with Charles MacArthur
Charles MacArthur
Charles Gordon MacArthur was an American playwright and screenwriter.-Biography:Charles MacArthur was the second youngest of seven children born to stern evangelist William Telfer MacArthur and Georgiana Welsted MacArthur. He early developed a passion for reading...
as an adaptation of their original play from 1932. It was directed by Howard Hawks, and starred John Barrymore
John Barrymore
John Sidney Blyth , better known as John Barrymore, was an acclaimed American actor. He first gained fame as a handsome stage actor in light comedy, then high drama and culminating in groundbreaking portrayals in Shakespearean plays Hamlet and Richard III...
and Carole Lombard
Carole Lombard
Carole Lombard was an American actress. She was particularly noted for her comedic roles in the screwball comedies of the 1930s...
. It's a comedy about a Broadway producer who was losing his leading lady to the seductive Hollywood film industry, and will do anything to win her back.
It's "a fast-paced, witty film that contains the rapid-fire dialogue for which Hecht became famous. It is one of the first, and finest, of the screwball comedies of the 1930s."
Viva Villa! (1934)
This was the story about Mexican rebel Pancho Villa
Pancho Villa
José Doroteo Arango Arámbula – better known by his pseudonym Francisco Villa or its hypocorism Pancho Villa – was one of the most prominent Mexican Revolutionary generals....
, who takes to the hills after killing an overseer in revenge for his father's death. It was directed by Howard Hawks and starred Wallace Beery
Wallace Beery
Wallace Fitzgerald Beery was an American actor. He is best known for his portrayal of Bill in Min and Bill opposite Marie Dressler, as Long John Silver in Treasure Island, as Pancho Villa in Viva Villa!, and his titular role in The Champ, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor...
. Although the movie took liberties with the facts, it became a great success, and Hecht received an Academy award nomination for his screenplay adaptation.
In a letter from the film's producer, David O. Selznick
David O. Selznick
David O. Selznick was an American film producer. He is best known for having produced Gone with the Wind and Rebecca , both of which earned him an Oscar for Best Picture.-Early years:...
, to studio head Louis B. Mayer
Louis B. Mayer
Louis Burt Mayer born Lazar Meir was an American film producer. He is generally cited as the creator of the "star system" within Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in its golden years. Known always as Louis B...
, Selznick discussed the need for a script rewrite:
- "I have arranged with Ben Hecht to do the final script of Viva Villa!... On the quality we are protected not merely by Hecht's ability but by the clause that the work must be to my satisfaction. It may seem like a short space of time for a man to do a complete new script, but Hecht is famous for his speed, and did the entire job on Scarface in eleven days."
Barbary Coast (1935)
Barbary Coast
Barbary Coast (film)
Barbary Coast is a period film directed by Howard Hawks. Shot in black-and-white and set in San Francisco during the Gold Rush era, the film combines elements of crime, Western, melodrama and adventure genres, features a wide range of actors, from good-guy Joel McCrea to bad-boy Edward G...
was also directed by Howard Hawks and starred Miriam Hopkins
Miriam Hopkins
Ellen Miriam Hopkins was an American actress known for her versatility in a wide variety of roles.Hopkins was born in Savannah, Georgia, and raised in Bainbridge, a town in the state's southwest near the Alabama border...
and Edward G. Robinson
Edward G. Robinson
Edward G. Robinson was a Romanian-born American actor. A popular star during Hollywood's Golden Age, he is best remembered for his roles as gangsters, such as Rico in his star-making film Little Caesar and as Rocco in Key Largo...
. The film takes place in late nineteenth century San Francisco with Hopkins playing the role of a dance-hall girl up against Robinson, who runs the town.
Nothing Sacred (1938)
Nothing Sacred
Nothing Sacred (film)
Nothing Sacred is a 1937 Technicolor screwball comedy film made by Selznick International Pictures and distributed by United Artists. It was directed by William A. Wellman and produced by David O. Selznick, from a screenplay credited to Ben Hecht, based on a story by James H. Street...
became Hecht's first project after he and Charles MacArthur closed their failing film company which they started in 1934. The film was adapted from his play, Hazel Flagg, and starred Carole Lombard as a small-town girl diagnosed with radium poisoning. "A reporter makes her case a cause for his newspaper. The story "allowed Hecht to work with one of his favorite themes, hypocrisy (especially among journalists); he took the themes of lying, decadence, and immorality and made them into a sophisticated screwball comedy."
Gunga Din (1939)
Gunga Din
Gunga Din (film)
Gunga Din is a 1939 RKO adventure film directed by George Stevens, loosely based on the poem of the same name by Rudyard Kipling, combined with elements of his novel Soldiers Three...
was co-written with Charles MacArthur and became "one of Hollywood's greatest action-adventure films." The screenplay was based on the poem by Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...
, directed by George Stevens
George Stevens
George Stevens was an American film director, producer, screenwriter and cinematographer.Among his most notable films were Diary of Anne Frank , nominated for Best Director, Giant , winner of Oscar for Best Director, Shane , Oscar nominated, and A Place in the Sun , winner of Oscar for Best...
and starred Cary Grant
Cary Grant
Archibald Alexander Leach , better known by his stage name Cary Grant, was an English actor who later took U.S. citizenship...
and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
Douglas Elton Fairbanks, Jr. KBE was an American actor and a highly decorated naval officer of World War II.-Early life:...
. In 1999 the film was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress.
Wuthering Heights (1939)
After working without credit on Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind (film)
Gone with the Wind is a 1939 American historical epic film adapted from Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer-winning 1936 novel of the same name. It was produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Victor Fleming from a screenplay by Sidney Howard...
in 1939, he co-wrote (with Charles MacArthur) an adaptation of Emily Bronte
Emily Brontë
Emily Jane Brontë 30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet, best remembered for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. Emily was the third eldest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother...
's novel Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights (1939 film)
Wuthering Heights is a 1939 American black-and-white film directed by William Wyler and produced by Samuel Goldwyn. It is based on the novel, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. The film depicts only sixteen of the novel's thirty-four chapters, eliminating the second generation of characters. The...
. Although the screenplay was actually cut off at the story's half-way point as it was considered too long, it was nominated for an Academy Award.
Movie historian James Harvey notes that in some respects It’s a Wonderful World is an even more accomplished film –the comedy counterpart to the supremely assured and high-spirited work Van Dyke had done on San Francisco (1936). "Ben Hecht, another speed specialist, wrote the screenplay (from a story by Hecht and Herman Mankiewicz); it’s in his Front Page vein, with admixtures of It Happened One Night
It Happened One Night
It Happened One Night is a 1934 American romantic comedy film with elements of screwball comedy directed by Frank Capra, in which a pampered socialite tries to get out from under her father's thumb, and falls in love with a roguish reporter . The plot was based on the story Night Bus by Samuel...
and Bringing Up Baby
Bringing up Baby
Bringing Up Baby is an American screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks, starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, and released by RKO Radio Pictures....
, as well as surprising adumbrations of the forties private-eye film.
Angels Over Broadway (1940)
Angels Over Broadway
Angels Over Broadway
Angels Over Broadway is a 1940 drama film in which a hustler, a showgirl, and an alcoholic playwright try to help an embezzler win enough money to return what he stole before it is too late....
was the only movie he directed, produced, and wrote originally for film, other than Specter of the Rose
Specter of the Rose
Specter of the Rose is a film written and directed by Ben Hecht, starring Judith Anderson, Ivan Kirov, Viola Essen, Michael Chekhov, and Lionel Stander and with choreography by Tamara Geva, and music by George Antheil....
(1946). It was considered "one of his most personal works." It starred Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
Douglas Elton Fairbanks, Jr. KBE was an American actor and a highly decorated naval officer of World War II.-Early life:...
and Rita Hayworth
Rita Hayworth
Rita Hayworth was an American film actress and dancer who attained fame during the 1940s as one of the era's top stars...
and was nominated for an Academy award. "The dialogue as well as the script's descriptive passages are chock full of brittle Hechtian similes that sparkle on the page but turn leaden when delivered. Hecht was an endlessly articulate raconteur. In his novels and memoirs, articulation dominates..."
In the script, he experimented with "reflections of life - as if a ghost were drifiting in the rain." These "reflections" of sidewalks, bridges, glass, and neon make the film a visual prototype of the forties film noir
Film noir
Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Hollywood's classic film noir period is generally regarded as extending from the early 1940s to the late 1950s...
.
Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946)
For Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
he wrote a number of his best psycho-dramas and received his final Academy award nomination for Notorious. He also worked without credit on Hitchcock's next two films, The Paradine Case
The Paradine Case
The Paradine Case is a 1947 American courtroom drama film, set in England, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by David O. Selznick. The screenplay was written by Selznick and an uncredited Ben Hecht, from an adaptation by Alma Reville and James Bridie of the novel by Robert Smythe Hichens...
(1947) and Rope
Rope (film)
Rope is a 1948 American thriller film based on the play Rope by Patrick Hamilton and adapted by Hume Cronyn and Arthur Laurents, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by Sidney Bernstein and Hitchcock as the first of their Transatlantic Pictures productions...
(1948). Spellbound
Spellbound (1945 film)
Spellbound is a psychological mystery thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1945. It tells the story of the new head of a mental asylum who turns out not to be what he claims. The film stars Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Michael Chekhov and Leo G. Carroll. It is an adaptation by Angus...
, the first time Hitchcock worked with Hecht, is notable for being one of the first Hollywood movies to deal seriously with the subject of psychoanalysis.
Monkey Business (1952)
In 1947 he teamed up with Charles Lederer
Charles Lederer
Charles Lederer was a prolific and well-connected American film writer and director of the 30s to the 60s, from a prominent theatrical family with close ties to the Hearst dynasty.-Early life:...
and cowrote three films: Her Husband's Affairs, Kiss of Death
Kiss of Death (1947 film)
Kiss of Death is a 1947 film noir movie directed by Henry Hathaway and written by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer from a story by Eleazar Lipsky. The story revolves around the film's protagonist, a former robber, and the antagonist, the ruthless, violent Tommy Udo...
, and Ride the Pink Horse. In 1950 he cowrote The Thing without credit. They again teamed up to write the 1952 screwball comedy Monkey Business
Monkey Business (1952 film)
Monkey Business is a screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, Marilyn Monroe, and Hugh Marlowe. To avoid confusion with the famous Marx Brothers movie of the same name, this film is sometimes referred to as Howard Hawks' Monkey...
, which became Hecht's last true success as a screenwriter.
Uncredited films
Among the more well-known films he helped write without credit were Gone with the WindGone with the Wind (film)
Gone with the Wind is a 1939 American historical epic film adapted from Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer-winning 1936 novel of the same name. It was produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Victor Fleming from a screenplay by Sidney Howard...
, The Shop Around the Corner
The Shop Around the Corner
-External links:* Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, Issue 1, 2010...
, Foreign Correspondent
Foreign Correspondent (film)
Foreign Correspondent is a 1940 American spy thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock which tells the story of an American reporter who tries to expose enemy spies in Britain, a series of events involving a continent-wide conspiracy that eventually leads to the events of a fictionalized World War...
, His Girl Friday
His Girl Friday
His Girl Friday is a 1940 American screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks, an adaptation by Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur of the play The Front Page by Hecht and MacArthur...
(the second film version of his play The Front Page), The Sun Also Rises
The Sun Also Rises (1957 film)
The Sun Also Rises is a 1957 film adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel of the same name, with the screenplay written by Peter Viertel. It starred Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner, Mel Ferrer and Errol Flynn. Much of it was filmed on location in France and Spain in Cinemascope and color by Deluxe...
, Mutiny on the Bounty
Mutiny on the Bounty (1962 film)
Mutiny on the Bounty is a 1962 film starring Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard based on the novel Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. The film retells the 1789 real-life mutiny aboard HMAV Bounty led by Fletcher Christian against the ship's captain, William Bligh...
, Casino Royale
Casino Royale (1967 film)
Casino Royale is a 1967 comedy spy film originally produced by Columbia Pictures starring an ensemble cast of directors and actors. It is set as a satire of the James Bond film series and the spy genre, and is loosely based on Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel.The film stars David Niven as the...
(1967), and The Greatest Show on Earth
The Greatest Show on Earth
The Greatest Show on Earth is a 1952 drama film set in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The film was produced, directed, and narrated by Cecil B. DeMille, and won the Academy Award for Best Picture...
.
Often, the only evidence of Hecht's involvement in a movie's screenplay has come from letters.
The following are snippets of letters discussing The Sun Also Rises
The Sun Also Rises (1957 film)
The Sun Also Rises is a 1957 film adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel of the same name, with the screenplay written by Peter Viertel. It starred Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner, Mel Ferrer and Errol Flynn. Much of it was filmed on location in France and Spain in Cinemascope and color by Deluxe...
, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
:
- Letter by David O. SelznickDavid O. SelznickDavid O. Selznick was an American film producer. He is best known for having produced Gone with the Wind and Rebecca , both of which earned him an Oscar for Best Picture.-Early years:...
to Hecht, 12/19/1956: "My present feeling is that eighty per cent of the script is eighty percent right, and that twenty per cent of it is eighty per cent wrong. That's pretty damn good, considering the time we spent on it, even though it was twice as long as you normally spend. So let's really try to do a job that will be ... something that we can be proud of for many years to come ..."
- Letter by Selznick to John HustonJohn HustonJohn Marcellus Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics: The Maltese Falcon , The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , Key Largo , The Asphalt Jungle , The African Queen , Moulin Rouge...
, 3/4/1957: "It is certainly not demeaning your talent to say that I don't think there is anybody alive who can come in on a job at the last minute and revise, without serious danger, work to which two old hands like Ben and myself have devoted many, many months of most careful work and devoted effort. . . it is also true that I have never seen Ben or anyone else bring to a job more thorough analysis, more willingness to rewrite, than he has."
The following letter discusses Portrait of Jennie
Portrait of Jennie
Portrait of Jennie is a 1948 fantasy film based on the novella by Robert Nathan. The film was directed by William Dieterle and produced by David O. Selznick. It stars Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten.-Plot:...
(1948):
- Letter by Selznick to Hecht, 11/24/1948: "Dear Ben: Very many thanks in advance for coming to the rescue again . . . the audience was enchanted ... and it set the mood beautifully for the picture . . . It needs the type of cinematic foreward journalese of which you are the only master I know . . . In any event, I shall be eagerly awaiting your redraft, which can take an entirely different form ... either actual or Hechtian creations..."
Gone with the Wind (1939)
For original screenplay writer Sidney Howard
Sidney Howard
Sidney Coe Howard was an American playwright and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1925 and a posthumous Academy Award in 1940 for the screenplay for Gone with the Wind.-Early life:...
, film historian Joanne Yeck writes, "reducing the intricacies of Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind (film)
Gone with the Wind is a 1939 American historical epic film adapted from Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer-winning 1936 novel of the same name. It was produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Victor Fleming from a screenplay by Sidney Howard...
's epic dimensions was a herculean task...and Howard's first submission was far too long, and would have required at least six hours of film; ... [producer] Selznick wanted Howard to remain on the set to make revisions...but Howard refused to leave New England [and] as a result, revisions were handled by a host of local writers, including Ben Hecht..." "Producer David O. Selznick
David O. Selznick
David O. Selznick was an American film producer. He is best known for having produced Gone with the Wind and Rebecca , both of which earned him an Oscar for Best Picture.-Early years:...
replaced the film's director three weeks into filming and then had the script rewritten. He sought out director Victor Fleming
Victor Fleming
Victor Lonzo Fleming was an American film director, cinematographer, and producer. His most popular films were The Wizard of Oz , and Gone with the Wind , for which he won an Academy Award for Best Director.-Life and career:Fleming was born in La Canada, California, the son of Elizabeth Evaleen ...
, who, at the time, was directing The Wizard of Oz
The Wizard of Oz (1939 film)
The Wizard of Oz is a 1939 American musical fantasy film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was directed primarily by Victor Fleming. Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf received credit for the screenplay, but there were uncredited contributions by others. The lyrics for the songs...
. Fleming was dissatisfied with the script, so Selznick brought in famed writer Ben Hecht to rewrite the entire screenplay within five days." Hecht was not credited, however, for his contribution, and Sydney Howard received the Academy award for Best Screenplay.
- "To Mr. O'Shea: Some time ago, it was my intention ot have, in addition to the Sidney Howard credit on Gone With the Wind, a list of contributing writers. I would rather now abandon this idea, first because while it is true that Sidney Howard did only a portion of the script ... [but] because I don't want to deprive Sidney Howard, and more particularly his widow, of any of the glory that may be attendant upon his last job."
In a letter [9/25/1939] from Selznick to Hecht, regarding writing introductory sequences and titles which were used to set the scene and condense the narrative throughout the movie, Selznick wrote,
- "Dear Ben: There are only seven titles needed for Gone With the Wind and I am certain you could bat them out in a few minutes, especially since a few of them can be based on titles you wrote while you were here. Will you do these for me in accordance with your promise? ... Very anxious to get picture into laboratory at once and would appreciate it if you could tackle them immediately upon their receipt"
His Girl Friday (1940)
"His Girl Friday
His Girl Friday
His Girl Friday is a 1940 American screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks, an adaptation by Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur of the play The Front Page by Hecht and MacArthur...
remains not just the fastest-talking romantic comedy ever made, but a very tricky inquiry into love's need for a chase (or a dream) and the sharpest pointer to uncertain gender roles."
The D.C. Examiner writes, "Director Howard Hawks’ 1940 classic “His Girl Friday” is not just one of the funniest screwball comedies ever made, it is also one of the finest film adaptations of a stage play. "Hawks took Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s Broadway hit “The Front Page,” the best play about newspapers ever written, and, by changing the gender of a major character, turned it into a romantic comedy. The new script was by Hecht (uncredited) and Charles Lederer
Charles Lederer
Charles Lederer was a prolific and well-connected American film writer and director of the 30s to the 60s, from a prominent theatrical family with close ties to the Hearst dynasty.-Early life:...
."
Casino Royale (1967)
Hecht wrote the first screenplay for Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming
Ian Lancaster Fleming was a British author, journalist and Naval Intelligence Officer.Fleming is best known for creating the fictional British spy James Bond and for a series of twelve novels and nine short stories about the character, one of the biggest-selling series of fictional books of...
's first novel, Casino Royale
Casino Royale (1967 film)
Casino Royale is a 1967 comedy spy film originally produced by Columbia Pictures starring an ensemble cast of directors and actors. It is set as a satire of the James Bond film series and the spy genre, and is loosely based on Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel.The film stars David Niven as the...
. Although the final screenplay and film was made into a comedy spoof, Hecht's version was written as a straight Bond adventure, states spy novelist Jeremy Duns
Jeremy Duns
Jeremy Duns is a British author currently residing in Stockholm, Sweden.He grew up mainly in Africa and Asia and attended St Catherine's College, Oxford, after which he worked as a journalist...
, who recently discovered the original lost scripts. According to Duns, Hecht's version included elements hard to imagine in a film adaptation, adding that "these drafts are a master-class in thriller-writing, from the man who arguably perfected the form with Notorious." Hecht himself wrote that he has "never had more fun writing a movie," and felt the James Bond character was cinema’s first "gentleman superman" in a long time, as opposed to Hammett and Chandler’s "roughneck supermen." A few days before the final screenplay was announced to the press, Hecht died of a heart attack at his home.
Duns compares Hecht's unpublished screenplay with the final rewritten film:
- "All the pages in Hecht’s papers are gripping, but the material from April 1964 is phenomenal, and it’s easy to imagine it as the basis for a classic Bond adventure. Hecht’s treatment of the romance element is powerful and convincing, even with the throwaway ending, but there is also a distinctly adult feel to the story. It has all the excitement and glamour you would expect from a Bond film but is more suspenseful, and the violence is brutal rather than cartoonish."
Excerpts: on movies and writers
"The factors that laid low so whooping and puissant an empire as the old Hollywood are many. I can think of a score, including the barbarian hordes of Television. But there is one that stands out for me in the post-mortem.... The factor had to do with the basis of movie-making: ‘Who shall be in charge of telling the story.’
...
“The answer Hollywood figured out for this question was what doomed it. It figured out that writers were not to be in charge of creating stories. Instead, a curious tribe of inarticulate Pooh-Bahs called Supervisors and , later, Producers were summoned out of literary nowhere and given a thousand scepters. It was like switching the roles of teacher and pupil in the fifth grade. The result is now history. An industry based on writing had to collapse when the writer was given an errand-boy status.
...
“The writer is a definite human phenomenon. He is almost a type – as pugilists are a type. He may be a bad writer – an insipid one or a clumsy one – but there is a bug in him that keeps spinning yarns; and that bulges his brow a bit, narrows his jaws, weakens his eyes and gives him girl children instead of boys. Nobody but a writer can write. People who hang around writers for years – as producers did – who are much smarter and have much better taste, never learn to write.
...
“Most of my script-writing friends – I never had more than a handful—took eagerly to the bottle or the analyst’s couch, filled their extravagant ménages with threats of suicide, hurled themselves into hysterical amours. And some of them actually died in their forties and fifties. Among these were the witty Herman Mankiewicz and F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
, the fine novelist.
...
“I have known a handful of producers who actually were equal or superior to the writers with whom they worked. These producers were a new kind of nonwriting writer hatched by the movies—as Australia produced wingless birds. They wrote without pencils or even words. Using a sort of mime-like talent, they could make up things like writers.
“When I come to put down their names, there weren’t many. David O. Selznick
David O. Selznick
David O. Selznick was an American film producer. He is best known for having produced Gone with the Wind and Rebecca , both of which earned him an Oscar for Best Picture.-Early years:...
, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, Walter Wanger
Walter Wanger
Walter Wanger was an American film producer. An intellectual and a socially conscious movie executive who produced provocative message movies and glittering romantic melodramas, Wanger's career began at Paramount Pictures in the 1920s and led him to work at virtually every major studio as either a...
, Irving Thalberg
Irving Thalberg
Irving Grant Thalberg was an American film producer during the early years of motion pictures. He was called "The Boy Wonder" for his youth and his extraordinary ability to select the right scripts, choose the right actors, gather the best production staff and make very profitable films.-Life and...
seem to exhaust the list…Ninety per cent of the producers I have known were not bright. They were as slow-witted and unprofessional toward making up a story as stockbrokers might be, or bus drivers. Even after twenty or thirty years of telling writers what and how to write, they were still as ignorant of writing as if they had never encountered the craft.
“Out of the seventy movies I’ve written some ten of them were not entirely waste product. These were Underworld, The Scoundrel, Wuthering Heights, Viva Villa, Scarface, Specter of the Rose, Actors and Sin, Roman Holiday, Spellbound, Nothing Sacred.”
Screenplays
- "It's gonna be just like war!" an editor exults. "That's it! War! You put that in the lead. 'WAR - GANG WAR!'" Scarface (1932)
- "The actual facts are so simple. I love you. You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto. Otto loves you. Otto loves me. There now! Start to unravel from there." Design for Living (1933)
- "They're a symbol of the whole town, pretending to fight, love, weep and laugh all the time - and they're phonies, all of them. And I head the list...their phony hearts were dripping with the milk of human kindness." Nothing Sacred (1937)
- "Three years ago, the white hope of the theatre. Today, a mug. That's New York for you. Puts you on a Christmas tree, and then - the alley." Angels Over Broadway (1940)
- "Gibbons is a man full of pain and violence. On this night, there is a Witch's Sabbath in his heart. Storms are blowing his world to bits and great troubles are pounding him on a reef." Angels Over Broadway (1940)
- "The only place I felt at home was in your heart. You were the only light that didn't go out on me." Angels Over Broadway (1940)
- "Keep those lights burning, cover them with steel, build them in with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them and, hello, America, hang on to your lights, they're the only lights in the world." Foreign Correspondent (1940)
- "You're such a nice boy, what do you want to go off and get killed in the War for?" Miracle in the Rain (1956)
Books
- "Writing a good movie brings a writer about as much fame as steering a bicycle. It gets him, however, more jobs. If his movie is bad it will attract only critical tut-tut for him. The producer, director and stars are the geniuses who get the hosannas when it's a hit. Theirs are also the heads that are mounted on spears when it's a flop." (from Let's Make the Hero a MacArthur)
- "In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel."
- "The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links."
- "People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized."
- When asked by his new wife's discomfited parents "Why didn't you tell us you were a Jew?", Hecht responded "I was afraid you would think I was bragging."
- "Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock."
- "There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age." (A Guide for the Bedevilled)
- "The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them." (Perfidy)
- "Like the actor, authority has faith in its false whiskers. But its deepest faith is in the human illusion. People will hang on to illusion as eagerly as life itself." (Perfidy)
- "Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty."
- "Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade."
- "A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it."
- "The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people."
- How My Egoism Died from A Child of the Century
Academy Award nominations
- 20th Academy Awards20th Academy AwardsThe 20th Academy Awards spread awards around, with no film receiving more than 3 awards, the last time this would happen until the 78th Academy Awards....
Nominated Notorious - 14th Academy Awards14th Academy AwardsThe 14th Academy Awards honored American film achievements in 1941 and was held in the Biltmore Bowl at the Biltmore Hotel. The ceremony is now considered notable, in retrospect, as the year in which Citizen Kane failed to win Best Picture. Best Picture of the year was awarded to How Green Was My...
Nominated Angels Over BroadwayAngels Over BroadwayAngels Over Broadway is a 1940 drama film in which a hustler, a showgirl, and an alcoholic playwright try to help an embezzler win enough money to return what he stole before it is too late.... - 13th Academy Awards13th Academy AwardsThe 13th Academy Awards honored American film achievements in 1940. This was the first year that sealed envelopes were used to keep secret the names of the winners which led to the famous phrase: "May I have the Envelope, please." The accounting firm of Price Waterhouse was hired to count the...
Nominated Wuthering HeightsWuthering Heights (1939 film)Wuthering Heights is a 1939 American black-and-white film directed by William Wyler and produced by Samuel Goldwyn. It is based on the novel, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. The film depicts only sixteen of the novel's thirty-four chapters, eliminating the second generation of characters. The... - 9th Academy Awards9th Academy AwardsThe 9th Academy Awards were held on March 4, 1937 at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, California. They were hosted by George Jessel. This ceremony marked the first time in which the categories of Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress were awarded.My Man Godfrey became the first film...
Won The ScoundrelThe ScoundrelThe Scoundrel is a drama film directed by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and starring Noël Coward, Julie Haydon, Stanley Ridges, and Lionel Stander. It was Coward's film debut, aside from a bit role in a silent film... - 8th Academy Awards8th Academy AwardsThe 8th Academy Awards were held on March 5, 1936 at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, California. They were hosted by Frank Capra. This was the first year in which the gold statuettes were called "Oscars."...
Nominated Viva Villa!Viva Villa!Viva Villa! is a 1934 American film starring Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa and was written by Ben Hecht, adapted from a biography by Edgecumb Pinchon and Odo B. Stade. The picture was directed by Jack Conway. There was special, uncredited help with the script by Howard Hawks, James Kevin... - 1st Academy Awards1st Academy AwardsThe 1st Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , honored the best films of 1927 and 1928 and took place on May 16, 1929, at a private dinner held at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, in Los Angeles, California. AMPAS president Douglas Fairbanks hosted the...
- Won UnderworldUnderworld (1927 film)Underworld is a 1927 silent crime film directed by Josef von Sternberg.-Plot:Boisterous gangster kingpin Bull Weed rehabilitates his former lawyer from his alcoholic haze, but complications arise when he falls for Weed's girlfriend.-Cast:* George Bancroft as "Bull" Weed* Evelyn Brent as "Feathers"...
Screenplays
- Kiss of DeathKiss of Death (1995 film)Kiss of Death is a 1995 crime thriller film starring David Caruso, Samuel L. Jackson, Nicolas Cage, Stanley Tucci, Ving Rhames and Helen Hunt, directed by Barbet Schroeder....
- Casino RoyaleCasino Royale (1967 film)Casino Royale is a 1967 comedy spy film originally produced by Columbia Pictures starring an ensemble cast of directors and actors. It is set as a satire of the James Bond film series and the spy genre, and is loosely based on Ian Fleming's first James Bond novel.The film stars David Niven as the...
(uncredited) - Circus WorldCircus World (film)Circus World, also known as Samuel Bronston's Circus World, is a 1964 drama film made by the independent production company Samuel Bronston Productions and distributed by Paramount Pictures...
- 7 Faces of Dr. Lao7 Faces of Dr. Lao7 Faces of Dr. Lao is a Metrocolor 1964 film adaptation of the 1935 fantasy novel The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney. It details the visit of a magical circus to a small town in the southwest United States, and the effects that visit has on the people of the town...
(uncredited) - CleopatraCleopatra (1963 film)Cleopatra is a 1963 British-American-Swiss epic drama film directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. The screenplay was adapted by Sidney Buchman, Ben Hecht, Ranald MacDougall, and Mankiewicz from a book by Carlo Maria Franzero. The film starred Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Rex Harrison, Roddy...
(uncredited) - Billy Rose's JumboBilly Rose's Jumbo (film)Billy Rose's Jumbo is an American musical film produced by MGM in Panavision and Metrocolor, and starring Jimmy Durante, Doris Day, Martha Raye, and Stephen Boyd. The film was directed by Charles Walters and featured Busby Berkeley's choreography...
- Mutiny on the BountyMutiny on the Bounty (1962 film)Mutiny on the Bounty is a 1962 film starring Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard based on the novel Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. The film retells the 1789 real-life mutiny aboard HMAV Bounty led by Fletcher Christian against the ship's captain, William Bligh...
(uncredited) - Walk on the Wild SideWalk on the Wild Side (film)Walk on the Wild Side is a 1962 film directed by Edward Dmytryk, adapted from the 1956 novel A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren. The film had a star-studded cast, including Laurence Harvey, Capucine, Jane Fonda , Anne Baxter, and Barbara Stanwyck, and was scripted by John Fante. Nonetheless,...
(uncredited) - North to AlaskaNorth to AlaskaNorth to Alaska is a 1960 comedic western movie directed by Henry Hathaway and John Wayne . It starred Wayne along with Stewart Granger, Ernie Kovacs, Fabian and Capucine....
(uncredited) - John Paul JonesJohn Paul Jones (film)John Paul Jones is a 1959 biographical epic film about John Paul Jones. The film was made by Samuel Bronston Productions and released by Warner Bros. It was directed by John Farrow and produced by Samuel Bronston from a screenplay by John Farrow, Ben Hecht, Jesse Lasky Jr. from the story Nor'wester...
(uncredited) - The Gun RunnersThe Gun RunnersThe Gun Runners, a 1958 film directed by Don Siegel, is the third adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not, starring Audie Murphy and Patricia Owens. Everett Sloane essays the part of the alcoholic sidekick originally played by Walter Brennan in the film's first adaptation,...
(uncredited) - Queen of Outer SpaceQueen of Outer SpaceQueen of Outer Space is a 1958 American CinemaScope science fiction feature film starring Zsa Zsa Gabor, Eric Fleming, and Laurie Mitchell in a tale about a revolt against a cruel Venusian queen. The screenplay by Charles Beaumont was based on an outline supplied by Ben Hecht...
- Legend of the LostLegend of the LostLegend of the Lost is a 1957 Italy/U.S. adventure film starring John Wayne, Sophia Loren, and Rossano Brazzi. The location shooting for the film took place near Tripoli, Libya.-Plot:...
- The Sun Also RisesThe Sun Also Rises (1957 film)The Sun Also Rises is a 1957 film adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel of the same name, with the screenplay written by Peter Viertel. It starred Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner, Mel Ferrer and Errol Flynn. Much of it was filmed on location in France and Spain in Cinemascope and color by Deluxe...
- A Farewell to ArmsA Farewell to Arms (1957 film)A Farewell to Arms is a 1957 American drama film directed by Charles Vidor. The screenplay by Ben Hecht, based in part on a 1930 play by Laurence Stallings, was the second feature film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's 1929 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. It was the last film produced...
- Miracle in the RainMiracle in the RainMiracle in the Rain is a novella by American writer Ben Hecht, published in The Saturday Evening Post bimonthly magazine on April 3, 1943 and adapted by him into a feature film released on March 31, 1956.-Film version:...
- The Iron PetticoatThe Iron PetticoatThe Iron Petticoat is a 1956 British Cold War comedy film starring Bob Hope and Katharine Hepburn and directed by Ralph Thomas. Hepburn plays a Russian aviatrix who lands in West Germany and is quickly converted to capitalism after sampling life in the West in the company of Major Chuck Lockwood...
- The Hunchback of Notre DameThe Hunchback of Notre Dame (1956 film)The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a 1956 French film version of Victor Hugo's novel of the same name, directed by Jean Delannoy and produced by Raymond Hakim and Robert Hakim. The film is the first version of the novel to be made in color.It stars Mexican actor Anthony Quinn as Quasimodo and Gina...
(uncredited) - TrapezeTrapeze (film)Trapeze is a 1956 circus film directed by Carol Reed and starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida, making her debut in American films....
(uncredited) - The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (uncredited)
- The Indian FighterThe Indian FighterThe Indian Fighter is a 1956 Western movie. It is from an original story by Robert L. Richards.-Plot:Johnny Hawks is a man who made his name fighting Indians...
- The Man with the Golden ArmThe Man with the Golden ArmThe Man with the Golden Arm is a 1955 American drama film, based on the novel of the same name by Nelson Algren, which tells the story of a heroin addict who gets clean while in prison, but struggles to stay that way in the outside world. It stars Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, Kim Novak, Arnold...
(uncredited) - Guys and DollsGuys and Dolls (film)Guys and Dolls is a 1955 musical film starring Marlon Brando, Jean Simmons, Frank Sinatra and Vivian Blaine. The film was made by the Samuel Goldwyn Company and distributed by MGM. It was produced by Samuel Goldwyn, and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who also wrote the screenplay...
(uncredited) - Living It UpLiving It UpLiving It Up is a 1954 film comedy starring the team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and released by Paramount Pictures.The film was directed by Norman Taurog and produced by Paul Jones. The screenplay by Jack Rose and Melville Shavelson was based on the 1953 musical Hazel Flagg by Ben Hecht, in...
(based on his play Hazel Flagg) - UlyssesUlysses (1955 film)Ulysses is a 1955 adventure film based on Homer's poem Odyssey. The movie was made by director Mario Camerini, who co-wrote the screenplay with writer Franco Brusati, aided by Mario Bava ....
- Light's Diamond Jubilee (television)
- Terminal Station (uncredited)
- Angel Face (uncredited)
- Hans Christian AndersenHans Christian Andersen (film)Hans Christian Andersen is a 1952 Hollywood musical film directed by Charles Vidor, with words and music by Frank Loesser. The story was by Myles Connolly, its screenplay was by Moss Hart and Ben Hecht , and was produced by The Samuel Goldwyn Company...
(uncredited) - Monkey BusinessMonkey Business (1952 film)Monkey Business is a screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, Marilyn Monroe, and Hugh Marlowe. To avoid confusion with the famous Marx Brothers movie of the same name, this film is sometimes referred to as Howard Hawks' Monkey...
- Actors and Sin (also directed and produced)
- The Wild Heart (uncredited)
- The Thing from Another WorldThe Thing from Another WorldThe Thing from Another World , is a 1951 science fiction film based on the 1938 novella "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell . It tells the story of an Air Force crew and scientists at a remote Arctic research outpost who fight a malevolent plant-based alien being...
(uncredited) - The Secret of Convict LakeThe Secret of Convict LakeThe Secret of Convict Lake is a 1951 black-and-white western film starring Glenn Ford and Gene Tierney. It was directed by Michael Gordon and produced by Frank P. Rosenberg, with music by Sol Kaplan...
(uncredited) - Strangers on a TrainStrangers on a Train (film)Strangers on a Train is an American psychological thriller film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and based on the 1950 novel of the same name by Patricia Highsmith. It was shot in the autumn of 1950 and released by Warner Bros. on June 30, 1951. The film stars Farley Granger, Ruth Roman,...
(uncredited) - September AffairSeptember AffairSeptember Affair is a 1950 film, directed by William Dieterle, starring Joan Fontaine, Joseph Cotten and Jessica Tandy. It was produced by Hal B. Wallis.-Plot:...
(uncredited) - Where the Sidewalk EndsWhere the Sidewalk EndsWhere the Sidewalk Ends is a 1950 American film noir directed and produced by Otto Preminger. The screenplay for the film was written by Ben Hecht, and adapted by Robert E. Kent, Frank P. Rosenberg, and Victor Trivas. The screenplay and adaptations were based on the novel Night Cry by William L....
- Edge of DoomEdge of DoomEdge of Doom is a 1950 film noir shot in black and white. The film was directed by Mark Robson. The screenplay was written by Philip Yordan . The film is based on a novel by Leo Brady...
(uncredited) - Perfect StrangersPerfect Strangers (1950 film)Perfect Strangers is a 1950 American comedy-drama film directed by Bretaigne Windust. The screenplay for the Warner Bros. release by Edith Sommer was based on an adaptation of the 1939 Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur play Ladies and Gentlemen by George Oppenheimer.-Plot:The title characters are Terry...
- Love HappyLove HappyLove Happy was the 14th and last starring feature for the Marx Brothers. The film stars Harpo Marx, Chico Marx, and, in a smaller role than usual, Groucho Marx, plus Ilona Massey, Vera-Ellen, Paul Valentine, Marion Hutton, Raymond Burr, Bruce Gordon , and Eric Blore, with a walk-on by Marilyn Monroe...
(uncredited) - The Inspector GeneralThe Inspector General (film)The Inspector General is a 1949 musical comedy film. It stars Danny Kaye and was directed by Henry Koster. The film also stars Walter Slezak, Gene Lockhart, Barbara Bates, Elsa Lanchester, Alan Hale Sr. and Rhys Williams. Original music by Sylvia Fine and Johnny Green.-Premise:The film is loosely...
(uncredited) - WhirlpoolWhirlpool (1949 film)Whirlpool is a thriller film noir directed by Otto Preminger and written by Ben Hecht and Andrew Solt, adapted from Guy Endore's novel Methinks the Lady. The film Stars Gene Tierney, Richard Conte, José Ferrer, Charles Bickford and Constance Collier in her final film role.The drama combines...
- Roseanna McCoyRoseanna McCoyRoseanna McCoy is a 1949 American drama film directed by Irving Reis. The screenplay by John Collier, based on the 1947 novel of the same title by Alberta Hannum, is a romanticized and semi-fictionalized account of the Hatfield-McCoy feud.-Plot:...
(uncredited) - Big Jack (uncredited)
- Portrait of JenniePortrait of JenniePortrait of Jennie is a 1948 fantasy film based on the novella by Robert Nathan. The film was directed by William Dieterle and produced by David O. Selznick. It stars Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten.-Plot:...
(uncredited) - Cry of the CityCry of the CityCry of the City is a 1948 black-and-white film noir directed by Robert Siodmak based on the novel by Henry Edward Helseth, The Chair for Martin Rome. Veteran film noir-writer Ben Hecht worked on the film's script, but is not credited...
(uncredited) - RopeRope (film)Rope is a 1948 American thriller film based on the play Rope by Patrick Hamilton and adapted by Hume Cronyn and Arthur Laurents, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by Sidney Bernstein and Hitchcock as the first of their Transatlantic Pictures productions...
(uncredited) - The Miracle of the BellsThe Miracle of the BellsThe Miracle of the Bells is a 1948 film produced by RKO. It stars Fred MacMurray, Alida Valli, Frank Sinatra, and Lee J. Cobb. Directed by Irving Pichel, with a script by Quentin Reynolds and Ben Hecht.The film is based on a novel by Russell Janney....
- Dishonored LadyDishonored LadyDishonored Lady is a film starring Hedy Lamarr, Dennis O'Keefe, John Loder, William Lundigan, and Natalie Schafer, directed by Robert Stevenson, and released by United Artists...
(uncredited) - Her Husband's Affairs
- The Paradine CaseThe Paradine CaseThe Paradine Case is a 1947 American courtroom drama film, set in England, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by David O. Selznick. The screenplay was written by Selznick and an uncredited Ben Hecht, from an adaptation by Alma Reville and James Bridie of the novel by Robert Smythe Hichens...
(uncredited) - Ride the Pink HorseRide the Pink HorseRide the Pink Horse is a 1947 American crime film noir produced by Universal Studios. It was directed by the actor Robert Montgomery from a screenplay by Ben Hecht, which was based on a novel of the same name by Dorothy B. Hughes. The drama features Robert Montgomery, Wanda Hendrix, Andrea King,...
- Kiss of DeathKiss of Death (1947 film)Kiss of Death is a 1947 film noir movie directed by Henry Hathaway and written by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer from a story by Eleazar Lipsky. The story revolves around the film's protagonist, a former robber, and the antagonist, the ruthless, violent Tommy Udo...
- Duel in the Sun (uncredited)
- Notorious
- A Flag is BornA Flag is BornA Flag Is Born was a play promoting the creation of a Jewish State in the ancient land of Israel. It opened on Broadway on September 4, 1946. The cast included Paul Muni, Celia Adler and Marlon Brando. Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter, Ben Hecht, was the playwright; it was directed by...
- Specter of the RoseSpecter of the RoseSpecter of the Rose is a film written and directed by Ben Hecht, starring Judith Anderson, Ivan Kirov, Viola Essen, Michael Chekhov, and Lionel Stander and with choreography by Tamara Geva, and music by George Antheil....
(also directed and produced) - GildaGildaGilda is a 1946 American black-and-white film noir directed by Charles Vidor. It stars Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth in her signature role as the ultimate femme fatale. The film was noted for cinematographer Rudolph Mate's lush photography, costume designer Jean Louis' wardrobe for Hayworth , and...
(uncredited) - CorneredCornered (film)Cornered is a film noir starring Dick Powell and directed by Edward Dmytryk. This is the second teaming of Powell and Dmytryk .Many scenes shot by cinematographer Harry J. Wild and Dmytryk stand out as classic film noir...
(uncredited) - SpellboundSpellbound (1945 film)Spellbound is a psychological mystery thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1945. It tells the story of the new head of a mental asylum who turns out not to be what he claims. The film stars Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Michael Chekhov and Leo G. Carroll. It is an adaptation by Angus...
- Watchtower Over Tomorrow
- LifeboatLifeboat (film)Lifeboat is an American war film directed by Alfred Hitchcock from a story written by John Steinbeck. The film stars Tallulah Bankhead, William Bendix, Walter Slezak, Mary Anderson, John Hodiak, Henry Hull, Heather Angel, Hume Cronyn and Canada Lee, and is set entirely on a lifeboat.The film is...
(uncredited) - The OutlawThe OutlawThe Outlaw is a 1943 American Western film, directed by Howard Hughes and starring Jane Russell. The supporting cast includes Jack Buetel, Thomas Mitchell, and Walter Huston. Hughes also produced the film, while Howard Hawks served as an uncredited co-director...
(uncredited) - China Girl
- Journey Into FearJourney into Fear (1943 film)Journey into Fear is an American spy film based on the Eric Ambler novel of the same name. The 1943 film broadly follows the plot of the book, but the protagonist was changed to an American engineer....
(uncredited) - The Black SwanThe Black Swan (film)The Black Swan is a 1942 swashbuckler Technicolor film by Henry King, based on a novel by Rafael Sabatini, and starring Tyrone Power and Maureen O'Hara. It was nominated for three Academy Awards, and won one for Best Cinematography, Color.-Plot:...
- Ten Gentlemen from West PointTen Gentlemen from West PointTen Gentlemen from West Point is a 1942 film directed by Henry Hathaway. It stars George Montgomery and Maureen O'Hara. It was nominated for an Academy Award in 1943. -Cast:*George Montgomery as Joe Dawson*Maureen O'Hara as Carolyn Brainbridge...
(uncredited) - Roxie HartRoxie Hart (film)Roxie Hart is a 1942 film directed by William A. Wellman and starring Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou, George Montgomery, Nigel Bruce, Phil Silvers, William Frawley, and Spring Byington....
(uncredited) - LydiaLydia (film)Lydia is a 1941 drama film, directed by Julien Duvivier. It stars Merle Oberon as Lydia MacMillan, a woman whose life is seen from her spoiled, immature youth through bitter and resentful middle years, until at last she is old and accepting...
- The Mad Doctor (uncredited)
- Comrade XComrade XComrade X is a 1940 lighthearted spy movie, starring Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr and directed by King Vidor.-Plot summary:In the Soviet Union, American reporter McKinley "Mac" Thompson secretly writes unflattering stories, attributed to "Comrade X", for his newspaper...
- Second ChorusSecond ChorusSecond Chorus is a Hollywood musical comedy film starring Fred Astaire, Burgess Meredith, Paulette Goddard, Artie Shaw, and Charles Butterworth, with music by Artie Shaw, Bernie Hanighen, Hal Borne and lyrics by Johnny Mercer. The film was directed by H. C...
(uncredited) - Angels Over BroadwayAngels Over BroadwayAngels Over Broadway is a 1940 drama film in which a hustler, a showgirl, and an alcoholic playwright try to help an embezzler win enough money to return what he stole before it is too late....
(also directed and produced) - Foreign CorrespondentForeign Correspondent (film)Foreign Correspondent is a 1940 American spy thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock which tells the story of an American reporter who tries to expose enemy spies in Britain, a series of events involving a continent-wide conspiracy that eventually leads to the events of a fictionalized World War...
(final scene-uncredited) - The Shop Around the CornerThe Shop Around the Corner-External links:* Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, Issue 1, 2010...
(uncredited) - His Girl FridayHis Girl FridayHis Girl Friday is a 1940 American screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks, an adaptation by Charles Lederer, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur of the play The Front Page by Hecht and MacArthur...
- I Take This WomanI Take This Woman (1940 film)I Take This Woman is a 1940 drama film starring Spencer Tracy and Hedy Lamarr.-Cast:*Spencer Tracy as Dr. Karl Decker*Hedy Lamarr as Georgi Gragore Decker*Verree Teasdale as Madame "Cesca" Marcesca*Kent Taylor as Phil Mayberry...
(uncredited) - Gone with the WindGone with the Wind (film)Gone with the Wind is a 1939 American historical epic film adapted from Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer-winning 1936 novel of the same name. It was produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Victor Fleming from a screenplay by Sidney Howard...
(uncredited) - At the CircusAt the CircusAt the Circus is a 1939 Marx Brothers comedy film released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in which they save a circus from bankruptcy...
(uncredited) - Lady of the Tropics
- It's a Wonderful World
- Wuthering HeightsWuthering Heights (1939 film)Wuthering Heights is a 1939 American black-and-white film directed by William Wyler and produced by Samuel Goldwyn. It is based on the novel, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. The film depicts only sixteen of the novel's thirty-four chapters, eliminating the second generation of characters. The...
- Let Freedom Ring
- Stagecoach (uncredited)
- Gunga DinGunga Din (film)Gunga Din is a 1939 RKO adventure film directed by George Stevens, loosely based on the poem of the same name by Rudyard Kipling, combined with elements of his novel Soldiers Three...
- Angels with Dirty FacesAngels with Dirty FacesAngels with Dirty Faces is a 1938 American gangster film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring James Cagney, Pat O'Brien, the Dead End Kids and Humphrey Bogart, along with Ann Sheridan and George Bancroft...
(uncredited) - The Goldwyn FolliesThe Goldwyn FolliesThe Goldwyn Follies is a 1938 Technicolor film written by Ben Hecht, Sid Kuller, Sam Perrin and Arthur Phillips, with music by George Gershwin, Vernon Duke, and Ray Golden, and lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Some sources credit Kurt Weill as one of the composers, but this is apparently incorrect...
- Nothing SacredNothing Sacred (film)Nothing Sacred is a 1937 Technicolor screwball comedy film made by Selznick International Pictures and distributed by United Artists. It was directed by William A. Wellman and produced by David O. Selznick, from a screenplay credited to Ben Hecht, based on a story by James H. Street...
- The HurricaneThe Hurricane (1937 film)The Hurricane is a 1937 film set in the South Seas, directed by John Ford and produced by Samuel Goldwyn, about a Polynesian who is unjustly imprisoned. The climax features a special effects hurricane. It stars Dorothy Lamour and Jon Hall, with Mary Astor, C. Aubrey Smith, Thomas Mitchell, Raymond...
(uncredited) - The Prisoner of ZendaThe Prisoner of Zenda (1937 film)The Prisoner of Zenda is a 1937 black-and-white adventure film based on the Anthony Hope 1894 novel of the same name and the 1896 play. Of the many film adaptations, this is considered by many to be the definitive version....
(uncredited) - Woman Chases ManWoman Chases ManWoman Chases Man is a 1937 romantic comedy film starring Miriam Hopkins and Joel McCrea. The plot concerns a former millionaire and his wealthy son Kenneth. The millionaire enlists the help of a young female architect named Virginia to con money out of his son in order to start up a housing project...
(uncredited) - King of Gamblers (uncredited)
- A Star Is BornA Star Is Born (1937 film)A Star Is Born is a 1937 Technicolor romantic drama film produced by David O. Selznick and directed by William A. Wellman, with a script by Wellman, Robert Carson, Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell. It stars Janet Gaynor as an aspiring Hollywood actress, and Fredric March as an aging movie star who...
(uncredited) - Soak the Rich (also directed)
- The ScoundrelThe ScoundrelThe Scoundrel is a drama film directed by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, and starring Noël Coward, Julie Haydon, Stanley Ridges, and Lionel Stander. It was Coward's film debut, aside from a bit role in a silent film...
(also directed) - Spring Tonic
- Barbary CoastBarbary Coast (film)Barbary Coast is a period film directed by Howard Hawks. Shot in black-and-white and set in San Francisco during the Gold Rush era, the film combines elements of crime, Western, melodrama and adventure genres, features a wide range of actors, from good-guy Joel McCrea to bad-boy Edward G...
- Once in a Blue Moon (also directed)
- The Florentine Dagger
- The President VanishesThe President VanishesThe President Vanishes is a political novel by Rex Stout that was published in 1934. It was written after, but published before, Fer-de-Lance, the first Nero Wolfe novel....
(uncredited) - Crime Without PassionCrime Without PassionCrime Without Passion is a 1934 American drama film directed by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, starring Claude Rains. It is the first of four pictures written, produced and directed by Hecht and MacArthur for Paramount Pictures...
(also directed) - Shoot the Works
- Twentieth CenturyTwentieth Century (film)Twentieth Century is a 1934 American screwball comedy film. Much of the film is set on the 20th Century Limited train as it travels from Chicago to New York. The film was directed by Howard Hawks, stars John Barrymore and Carole Lombard, and features Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns and Edgar Kennedy...
(uncredited) - Upperworld
- Viva Villa!Viva Villa!Viva Villa! is a 1934 American film starring Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa and was written by Ben Hecht, adapted from a biography by Edgecumb Pinchon and Odo B. Stade. The picture was directed by Jack Conway. There was special, uncredited help with the script by Howard Hawks, James Kevin...
- Riptide (uncredited)
- Queen ChristinaQueen Christina (film)Queen Christina is a Pre-Code Hollywood feature film loosely based on the life of 17th century Queen Christina of Sweden, produced in 1933, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, starring Swedish-born actress Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Ian Keith and Lewis Stone. It was billed as Garbo's return to cinema...
(uncredited) - Design for LivingDesign for Living (film)Design for Living is a 1933 American comedy film produced and directed by Ernst Lubitsch. The screenplay by Ben Hecht is based on the 1933 play of the same name by Noël Coward. It concerns a trio of artistic Americans in Paris and their complicated three-way relationship.The film stars Fredric...
- Turn Back the ClockTurn Back the Clock (film)Turn Back the Clock is an MGM comedy drama film directed by Edgar Selwyn, written by Edgar Selwyn and Ben Hecht, and starring by Lee Tracy and Mae Clarke...
- Topaze
- Hallelujah, I'm a BumHallelujah, I'm a Bum (film)Hallelujah, I'm a Bum is a 1933 American musical comedy film directed by Lewis Milestone in the Depression.The film stars Al Jolson as Bumper, a popular New York tramp, and both romanticizes and satirizes the hobo lifestyle that many people were forced into by the economic conditions of the time....
- Back StreetBack Street (1932 film)Back Street is a 1932 film made by Universal Pictures, directed by John M. Stahl, and produced by Carl Laemmle Jr.. The screenplay was written by Gladys Lehman and based on the novel by Fannie Hurst. The film stars Irene Dunne and John Boles.-Plot:...
(uncredited) - Rasputin and the EmpressRasputin and the EmpressRasputin and the Empress is a 1932 film about Imperial Russia starring the Barrymore siblings—John , Ethel , and Lionel Barrymore . It is the only film in which all three appeared together...
(uncredited) - Million Dollar Legs (uncredited)
- ScarfaceScarface (1932 film)Scarface is a 1932 American gangster film starring Paul Muni and George Raft, produced by Howard Hughes, directed by Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson, and written by Ben Hecht based on the 1929 novel of the same name by Armitage Trail...
- The Beast of the CityThe Beast of the CityThe Beast of the City is a 1932 pre-Code gangster movie featuring cops as vigilantes and known for its singularly vicious ending. Written by W.R...
(uncredited) - The Unholy Garden (1931 film)The Unholy Garden (1931 film)The Unholy Garden is a 1931 drama film directed by George Fitzmaurice and starring Ronald Colman. It was based on a story by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. -Plot:...
- The Sin of Madelon ClaudetThe Sin of Madelon ClaudetThe Sin of Madelon Claudet is a 1931 American drama film directed by Edgar Selwyn and starring Helen Hayes. The screenplay by Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht was adapted from the play The Lullaby by Edward Knoblock...
(uncredited) - Monkey BusinessMonkey Business (1931 film)Monkey Business is a 1931 comedy film. It is the third of the Marx Brothers' released movies, and the first not to be an adaptation of one of their Broadway shows. The film stars the four brothers: Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx, and Zeppo Marx, and screen comedienne Thelma Todd. It is...
(uncredited) - Homicide Squad (uncredited)
- Quick MillionsQuick MillionsQuick Millions is a 1931 Pre-Code crime film directed by Rowland Brown. The film involves a truck driver and the wealthy woman that he covets, and also features George Raft and Leon Ames in supporting roles.-Cast:...
(uncredited) - Le Spectre vert
- Roadhouse NightsRoadhouse NightsRoadhouse Nights is a 1930 gangster film very loosely based on the novel Red Harvest written by Dashiell Hammett , but the screenplay differs sharply from the novel, with the storyline almost entirely rewritten by screenwriter Ben Hecht...
- Street of ChanceStreet of Chance (1930 film)Street of Chance is a 1930 film directed by John Cromwell and starring William Powell, Jean Arthur, Kay Francis and Regis Toomey.- Plot :...
(uncredited) - The Unholy NightThe Unholy NightThe Unholy Night is a 1929 mystery film directed by Lionel Barrymore, starring Ernest Torrence and featuring Boris Karloff.-Cast:* Ernest Torrence - Dr...
- The Great GabboThe Great GabboThe Great Gabbo is an American early sound film musical drama film directed by James Cruze, based on a story by Ben Hecht and starring Erich von Stroheim and Betty Compson....
- The Big Noise
- The American Beauty (uncredited)
- UnderworldUnderworld (1927 film)Underworld is a 1927 silent crime film directed by Josef von Sternberg.-Plot:Boisterous gangster kingpin Bull Weed rehabilitates his former lawyer from his alcoholic haze, but complications arise when he falls for Weed's girlfriend.-Cast:* George Bancroft as "Bull" Weed* Evelyn Brent as "Feathers"...
- The New KlondikeThe New KlondikeThe New Klondike is a 1926 black-and-white silent romantic comedy sports drama film directed by Lewis Milestone for Famous Players-Lasky. The film was set against the backdrop of the Florida land boom of the 1920s, and stands as Ben Hecht's first film assignment.-Background:Partly filmed on...
(uncredited)
Books (partial list)
- 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, McGee/Covici, (1922); University of Chicago PressUniversity of Chicago PressThe University of Chicago Press is the largest university press in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including The Chicago Manual of Style, dozens of academic journals, including Critical Inquiry, and a wide array of...
, (2009) ISBN 978-0-226-32274-2 - Fantazius Mallare, a Mysterious Oath, 174 pp., Pascal CoviciPascal CoviciPascal Avram "Pat" Covici was a Romanian Jewish-American book publisher and editor.- Early life :Pascal Avram Covici, known to his friends as "Pat," was born November 4, 1885 in Botoşani, Romania. He was the son of vintner Wolf Covici and Schfra Barish...
(1922) - The Florentine Dagger: A Novel for Amateur Detectives w/ illustrations by Wallace Smith, 256 pp. Boni & Liveright (1923)
- Kingdom of Evil, 211pp., Pascal CoviciPascal CoviciPascal Avram "Pat" Covici was a Romanian Jewish-American book publisher and editor.- Early life :Pascal Avram Covici, known to his friends as "Pat," was born November 4, 1885 in Botoşani, Romania. He was the son of vintner Wolf Covici and Schfra Barish...
(1924) - Broken Necks { Containing More 1001 Afternoons }, 344pp., Pascal CoviciPascal CoviciPascal Avram "Pat" Covici was a Romanian Jewish-American book publisher and editor.- Early life :Pascal Avram Covici, known to his friends as "Pat," was born November 4, 1885 in Botoşani, Romania. He was the son of vintner Wolf Covici and Schfra Barish...
(1926) - Count Bruga, 319 pp., Boni & Liveright (1926)
- The Book of Miracles, 465 pp., Viking Press (1939)
- A Guide for the Bedevilled, 276 pages, Charles Scribner's Sons (1944), 216 pp. Milah Press Incorporated (September 1, 1999) ISBN 0-9646886-2-X
- The Collected Stories of Ben Hecht, 524 pp., Crown (1945)
- Perfidy (with critical supplements), 281 pp. (plus 29 pp.), Julian Messner (1962)
- Perfidy 288 pp. Milah Press (1961), Inc. (April 1, 1997) ISBN 0-9646886-3-8
- Concerning a Woman of Sin, 222 pp., Mayflower (1964)
- Gaily, Gaily, Signet (1963) (November 1, 1969) ISBN
- A Child of the Century 672 pp. Plume (1954) (May 30, 1985) ISBN
- The Front Page, Samuel French Inc Plays (January 1, 1998) ISBN
- The Champion From Far Away (1931)
- Actor's Blood (1936)
- A Treasury Of Ben Hecht: Collected Stories And Other Writings (1959, anthology)
- Erik Dorn
- A Jew in Love
- I Hate Actors!
- 1001 Afternoons in New York
- The Sensualists
- Winkelberg
- Miracle in the Rain
- Letters From Bohemia
- Gargoyles
- The Egoist
Musical contributions
- Uncle Sam Stands Up (1941) Hecht contributed the lyrics and poetry to this patriotic cantata for baritone solo, chorus, and orchestra by Ferde GrofeFerde GroféFerde Grofé was a prominent American composer, arranger and pianist. During the 1920s and 1930s, he went by the name Ferdie Grofé.-Early life:...
, written during the height of World War II - We Will Never Die (1943) a pageant he composed with Kurt WeillKurt WeillKurt Julian Weill was a German-Jewish composer, active from the 1920s, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht...
, with staging by Moss HartMoss HartMoss Hart was an American playwright and theatre director, best known for his interpretations of musical theater on Broadway.-Early years:...
, written partly because of Hecht's consternation with American foreign policy in Europe concerning the Holocaust and Hollywood's fear of offending European (Axis) markets.
External links
- Works by or about Ben Hecht at Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
and Google Books (scanned books original editions) (plain text and HTML) - Ben Hecht: Biography with credits for many other works
- Summary: Perfidy and the Kastner Trial
- "Perfidy" Written by Ben Hecht: Reviewed by Michael Jacobs
- "Nirvana" by Ben Hecht
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Ben Hecht
- Ben Hecht Papers at the Newberry Library