Word: hecht
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Vera Cruz (Hecht-Lancaster; United Artists), billed as "The Battle of the Giants," is apparently an attempt to decide the heavyweight championship of Hollywood. In one corner stands Burt Lancaster, congenital desperado, and in the other Gary Cooper, Southern gentle man dispossessed by the Civil War. The rough stuff gets under way somewhere south of the border, around 1866. Bullets squeal, gun butts crunch, death screams gurgle, bombs go bam! And when a man is all tuckered out, some señorita is like as not to come slinking up with a rose in her teeth and a pigsticker...
...CHILD OF THE CENTURY, by Ben Hecht. What one man's ego looks like spread over 654 pages: the playwright and scriptwriter flaunted his hard outer shell, his soft inner character, unconsciously explained why he rarely found "love, understanding or comfort...
...film Tolstoy's War and Peace next year in Yugoslavia and that Dictator Marshal Tito has agreed to lend 70,000 Yugoslavian troops as extras. A few days later, David O. (Gone With the Wind) Selznick chuckled as he reminded the world that he and Writer Ben Hecht were planning the very same film. Said Selznick: "I, too, have been contacted by the Yugoslavian government. However, I doubt that Tito's troops are uniformed and equipped in the manner of the armies of Bonaparte and Alexander...
Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht, whose Front Page is still circulating, also engineered this movie, and its hectic, rarely subtle humor is their trademark. Except for the absence of a heroine, the nicest thing about Gunga Din is the movie's willingness to take itself with a block of salt. Grant, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Victor McLaglen form a sort of Her Majesty's Three Musketeers in India. After a certain amount of intrigue and a little less suspense Din helps them to conquer a mysterious native tribe. The plot is exactly the same as it was 15 years...
...From Ben Hecht ex-newsman, author and sometime movie scenarist, came another slashing denunciation of Hollywood (his last: in a chapter of his biography A Child of the Century-TIME, June 21). This time Hecht replied to critics who say that he is biting the hands that fed him. Said he: "I got $12,000 from M-G-M for writing Viva Villa, and all the studio made on the picture was $2,000,000 net. I was paid $19,000 by RKO for writing Scarf ace, which made between...