Word: hecht
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1940
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Angels Over Broadway (Columbia). In spite of the fabulous salary he draws as a screen writer (some $6,000 weekly) balding Ben Hecht spends many of his expensive words on acid comments about Hollywood moviemakers. Possibly as protest, he and his sidekick, Playwright Charles MacArthur, took four flings at independent movie production, scored one bull's-eye with The Scoundrel, eventually quit. This year, Columbia gave Hecht $260,000 worth of Hollywood backing with which he wrote, produced, directed Angels Over Broadway, another of his preoccupations with the regeneration of moral strays who have felt the cooling shadow...
...Elyria, Ohio, was dictating a letter to his secretary. Suddenly he said, "I am walking in the bed of a river," put on his hat, strode out of the paint factory, out of the town forever. He got an advertising job in Chicago, met Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Ben Hecht, began writing stories himself. After two poor novels, Anderson brought out a remarkable sketch of small-town life, Winesburg, Ohio...
...started over again with two MARCH OF TIME radio scripters to tell the story in MOT fashion, then switched back to Sheean. After Hitler invaded Poland, Wanger dumped everything into the capacious lap of Director Alfred Hitchcock. He, together with Charles Bennett, James Hilton, Robert Benchley and Ben Hecht, evolved Foreign Correspondent. Fourteen writers and $1,500,000 away from Personal History, it has nothing to do with Sheean and is easily one of the year's finest pictures...
...quit for a quiet home life with an insurance salesman. Boss dislikes the idea, and with the help of a real reporter's murder story gets girl back. Salesman goes back to Albany with his mother. Thereby hangs the tale, but the men who have adapted it from the Hecht-Mac Arthur stage play, "Front Page," have made it one of the funniest of the season...
...forcing his actors to speak 240 words a minute (average conversational speed - 90 words a minute). Rough est spots in the original versions have been sandpapered or excised, the pressroom's whiskey cynicism toned down to half of one per cent, but the comedy still has enough Hecht-MacArthur kick to make later interpolations smell synthetic. Synthetic sample: "What does he [Ralph Bellamy] look like?" Editor Burns: "Oh, he looks like that movie actor-Ralph Bellamy...