Profile of Ben Hecht on Famous Like Me

Ben Hecht (February 28, 1894 – April 18, 1964) was one of the most prolific of all Hollywood screenwriters, even though he professed disdain for the motion picture industry, and a human rights and Zionism activist.

Life and career in Hollywood

Hecht was raised in Racine, Wisconsin, and as a young man moved to Chicago, where he became a reporter and, eventually, a short-story writer and novelist. He eventually landed in New York, where he met movie mogul David O. Selznick. The two were to be lifelong friends and frequent collaborators.

Hecht eventually moved to Hollywood, where he scripted Josef von Sternberg's gangster story Underworld in 1927, and won an Oscar for his work at the first Academy Awards presentation. His most famous work was the stage comedy The Front Page, which he wrote with frequent collaborator Charles MacArthur. It was first translated to film in 1931 and three more times, most notably as Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday in 1940. Much of Hecht's later work was uncredited, as he worked as a "script doctor".

Hecht had an early talk show on television in the New York metropolitan area in the 1950s and 1960s.

Jewish and anti-Holocaust activism

Ben Hecht was a great supporter of Zeev Jabotinsky and the right-wing Revisionist Zionism movement of Menachem Begin. He subsequently wrote and published the book Perfidy, dramatizing the failure to rescue Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust, and the roles of the Zionist leader Rudolf Kastner and others in high leadership positions in that affair, which was the subject of a famous libel trial when Kastner sued Grunwald, who had accused him of complicity with the Nazis. In that trial, although the court initially held that these accusations were correct, on appeal it was unanimously held that they were largely untrue or unfair and the verdict was reversed. The case remains highly controversial (see for example ; ; ; and ) and it is not universally accepted that Hecht's account can be accepted as fair.

Hecht also opposed the social-democratic policies of Israel's first two prime ministers David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett, and of the Jewish Agency for what he regarded as their complicit silence and co-operation with the British during World War II in not doing more to rescue Jews and open the doors of Palestine to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and occupied Europe. He spoke out against the lack of interest in saving the Jews trapped in Europe during the Holocaust. He purchased newspaper advertising in New York's newspapers to publicize the fate of Hitler's victims. In one such "advertisement" with the headline: "FOR SALE: 70,000 JEWS AT $50 APIECE GUARANTEED HUMAN BEINGS" explaining that three and a half million dollars would rescue the then trapped Romanian Jews (quoted in his work Perfidy, pp. 191-192).

Quotes

How My Egoism Died, From: A Child in the Century

A simple fact entered my head one day and put an end to my revolt against the Deity. It occurred to me that God was not engaged in corrupting the mind of man but in creating it. This may sound like no fact at all, or like the most childish of quibbles. But whatever it is, it brought me a sigh of relief, a slightly bitter sigh. I was relieved because instead of beholding a man as a finished and obviously worthless product, unable to bring sanity into human affairs, I looked on him (in my conversion) as a creature in the making. And lo, I was aware that like my stooped and furry brothers, the apes, I am God's incomplete child. My groping brain, no less than my little toe, is a mechanism in His evolution-busy hands.

Other famous quotes

• 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.

Ben Hecht's Academy Award nominations

• 1947 Nominated Notorious
• 1941 Nominated Angels Over Broadway
• 1940 Nominated Wuthering Heights
• 1936 Won The Scoundrel
• 1935 Nominated Viva Villa!
• 1929 Won Underworld

Ben Hecht's writing filmography

• Casino Royale
• Circus World
• Seven Faces of Dr. Lao
• Cleopatra
• Billy Rose's Jumbo
• Mutiny on the Bounty
• Walk on the Wild Side
• North to Alaska
• John Paul Jones
• The Gun Runners
• Queen of Outer Space
• Kiss of Death
• Legend of the Lost
• A Farewell to Arms
• Miracle in the Rain
• The Iron Petticoat
• Notre Dame de Paris
• Trapeze
• The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell
• The Indian Fighter
• The Man with the Golden Arm
• Guys and Dolls
• Living It Up
• Ulisse
• Light's Diamond Jubilee (television)
• Indiscretion of an American Wife
• Angel Face
• Hans Christian Andersen
• Monkey Business
• Actors and Sin
• The Wild Heart
• The Thing From Another World
• The Secret of Convict Lake
• Strangers on a Train
• September Affair
• Where the Sidewalk Ends
• Edge of Doom
• Perfect Strangers
• Love Happy
• The Inspector General
• Whirlpool
• Roseanna McCoy
• Big Jack
• Portrait of Jennie
• Cry of the City
• Alfred Hitchcock's Rope
• The Front Page
• The Miracle of the Bells
• Dishonored Lady
• Her Husband's Affairs
• The Paradine Case
• Ride the Pink Horse
• Duel in the Sun
• Notorious
• Specter of the Rose
• Gilda
• Cornered
• Spellbound
• Watchtower Over Tomorrow
• Lifeboat
• The Outlaw
• China Girl
• Journey Into Fear
• The Black Swan
• Ten Gentlemen from West Point
• Roxie Hart
• Lydia
• The Mad Doctor
• Comrade X
• Second Chorus
• Angels Over Broadway
• Foreign Correspondent
• The Shop Around the Corner
• His Girl Friday
• I Take This Woman
• Gone with the Wind
• The Marx Brothers at the Circus
• Lady of the Tropics
• It's a Wonderful World
• Some Like It Hot (1939)
• Wuthering Heights
• Let Freedom Ring
• Stagecoach
• Gunga Din
• Angels with Dirty Faces
• The Goldwyn Follies
• Nothing Sacred
• The Hurricane
• The Prisoner of Zenda
• Woman Chases Man
• King of Gamblers
• A Star Is Born
• Soak the Rich
• The Scoundrel
• Spring Tonic
• Barbary Coast
• Once in a Blue Moon
• The Florentine Dagger
• The President Vanishes
• Crime Without Passion
• Shoot the Works
• Twentieth Century
• Upperworld
• Viva Villa!
• Riptide
• Queen Christina
• Design for Living
• Turn Back the Clock
• Topaze
• Hallelujah, I'm a Bum
• Back Street
• Rasputin and the Empress
• Million Dollar Legs
• Scarface
• The Beast of the City
• The Unholy Garden
• The Sin of Madelon Claudet
• Monkey Business
• Homicide Squad
• Quick Millions
• Le Spectre vert
• Roadhouse Nights
• Street of Chance
• The Unholy Night
• The Great Gabbo
• The Big Noise
• American Beauty
• Underworld
• The New Klondike

Books (partial list)

• A Child of the Century 672 pp. Plume (May 30, 1985) ISBN 0917657411
• A Guide for the Bedevilled 216 pp. Milah Press, Incorporated (September 1, 1999) ISBN 096468862X
• Gaily, Gaily, Signet (November 1, 1969) ISBN 0451040821
• The Front Page, Samuel French Inc Plays (January 1, 1998) ISBN 0573609128
• 1001 Afternoons in New York, 370 pp., Viking Press (1941) ASIN B0007E7X9K
• Perfidy 288 pp. Milah Press, Inc. (April 1, 1997) ISBN 0964688638
• Erik Dorn

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