Word: hecht
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...When Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote their hotfooted newspaper comedy nearly half a century ago, they started a kind of show-business dynasty. Besides stage revivals, there was a television series in 1949, and now a third movie version of The Front Page is out. The first film was produced in 1930, almost as soon as Hollywood found its tongue. It starred Pat O'Brien as Hildy Johnson, dervish of the deadline and past master of the fictitious fact, and Adolphe Menjou as his congenially mean-spirited editor, Walter Burns. Ten years later Howard Hawks changed the title...
Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond (who have collaborated on Some Like It Hot and The Apartment) give a friendly nod to Hecht's ghost by having Hildy speak of the time "Ben Hecht was leaving for Hollywood." But neither Hecht nor MacArthur could be expected to countenance what has been done to their original. Dialogue that should crackle like a telegraph has been slowed to the listless deliberation of a traffic cop writing out a ticket. Jack Lemmon makes a curiously enervated Hildy, and Walter Matthau's Burns is a shambling cynic too similar to his Odd Couple...
...Front Page, the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur classic about newspaper high jinks circa 1928, police reporters stop at nothing in pursuit of a new lead or an old adversary. Journalists have become more genteel since then-some say more timid-but once in a while the old ways show up. Two enterprising Louisville reporters, Howard Fineman, 25, of the morning Courier-Journal and Jerry Hicks, 27, of the afternoon Times, were arrested last May for eavesdropping on a closed meeting of the local Fraternal Order of Police...
...Front Page is a melodramatic comedy or a comic melodra by Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht, about a hardboiled but purposeless reporter from Chicago who sets out to save an innocent man convicted of murder, or something. It's a fine play, although more or less reliable sources say it's not being done too well--a recurrent problem on the Mainstage. Until Saturday, 8 p.m., at the Loeb...
...Hecht said yesterday that Lowell had made a major progression in theme since "Lord Weary's Castle," but praised him for maintaining a sense of continuity in his verse. "'Lord Weary's Castle' was clearly a religious book of verse, whereas his current books are not," Hecht said yesterday. "But his verse has a sense of continuity. It is an inquisition into himself, a painful and self-defeating questioning of the self which seems to echo the life of society in general...