Word: hecht
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Specter of the Rose (Republic) is what happened when Republic handed Writer-Director-Producer Ben Hecht the price of a horse opera ($200,000) and left him strictly alone to create-if he could-a work of art. The picture rates solid A for effort, something between A and low D for quality. Parts of it will delight a limited audience...
Swan Song (by Ben Hecht & Charles Mac Arthur; produced by John Clein) finds the authors of Twentieth Century and The Front Page collaborating on Broadway for the first time in seven years. But only as rewrite men. They have varnished up a thriller called Crescendo that thudded on the road last winter-and that is still dead wood...
Most of the evening is devoted to conversation (a handful of good Hecht & MacArthur cracks, a hunk of fancy chatter about psychiatry and art) and to pianoplaying. Twelve-year-old Jacqueline Horner plays Chopin and Mozart with precocious skill; but the concert by no means makes up for the claptrap...
...long ride ends; say to us where the young buck has gone? It seemed to him "a goodbye to the West, a goodbye to youth. . . . I began to find a meaning of my own young years." Fowler trained in the same up-from-cops school of journalism as Ben Hecht. Stanley Walker and the late Courtney Ryley Cooper, whose credo is that the old bars were the best, and that the only thing to do with a tall tale is to make it taller. Solo has many moments of awed moralizing, semi-penitential, Hollywood-haunted sentiment. But throughout runs...
...chasing two frightened lovers through thousands of suspenseful feet of film to a slam-bang finish. This time he turns his formula and the police on Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck and hounds them expertly through a hotel lobby, a railway station, a train. But thanks to Ben Hecht's script, the real hue & cry is in the hero's mind. Miss Bergman, disguised in hornrimmed glasses, scrambles grimly after Hero Peck through the dark corridors of his paranoid guilt complex. The result is often good entertainment, but it does not tingle with Hitchcock's usual sustained...