Word: hecht
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Hecht, Hollywood-Broadway literary swashbuckler, gave the Manhattan press the inside dope on how he buckles down to work for the cinema. "I'm a Hollywood writer," he explained. "So I put on a sports jacket, and take off my brain...
...story is a Hecht original: a great dancer (Ivan Kirov), subject to fits of homicidal insanity, marries a budding ballerina (Viola Essen), who hopes that his dancing and her love will work a cure. Great Teacher Judith Anderson and threadbare Impresario Michael Chekhov, torn between terror and balletomania, hover unhappily in the wings. Another sideliner, Poet Lionel Stander, grates out Mr. Hecht's own highly debatable views on Love & Art, and dashes an occasional gruelly tear from his granitic eye. To climax a triumphant tour, the dancer's mind finally cracks and he turns...
...filming this sad tale, Ben Hecht intelligently cut costs and also sharpened his effects by hiring eager newcomers and first-rate but not too expensive veterans whose capacity for hard work matched his own. Chief weakness of George Antheil's alert score is the absence of Spectre's traditional music (Carl Maria von Weber's Invitation to the Waltz). Among the film's good points: young Kirov's tormented athleticism; Viola Essen's fresh beauty; the rich, workmanlike performances of Miss Anderson and Mr. Chekhov...
Contending with such excellence, and often winning the fall: the purple-plush artiness, 200-proof corn and gross sentimentality which Ben Hecht often fails to separate from the honest and original features of his talent...
...Hecht calls Solomon Rabinowitch "the greatest humorist the Jews ever produced." Rabinowitch was born in Pereyaslav, the Ukraine, in 1859. In his father's inn Sol grew from boyhood to manhood-and observed the customers. At 23, he began to write-about the customers-for Hamelitz, a Jewish periodical. He took the pen name Sholom Aleichem, the Jewish equivalent of "How do you do?", and turned out copy like a mimeograph...