Word: hechts
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...pillaged. It is crammed with neurotic, 19th-Century gloom, ridden with implications of incest, short on action, careless of conventional morality. As additional drawbacks, Mr. Olivier, entrusted with the crucial role of Heathcliff, boasts that he dislikes working for the movies and only does it for money; Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, preparing for their labors on Gunga Din, could barely be persuaded to leave their marathon backgammon game long enough to write a script. The script turned out brilliantly. Olivier's work as Heathcliff is a speaking tribute to the efficacy of the profit motive...
...story of Gunga Din, written by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and made into a screen play by Joel Sayre and Fred Guiol, appears to be a sort of Anglo-Indian Three Musketeers. What plot there is concerns the efforts of two sergeants to persuade the third to re-enlist when his period of service expires. This entails much hand-to-hand fighting against a band of Thugs, a few barrack-room practical jokes and frequent athletic tricks of the sort popularized by Master Fairbanks' father. Funny, spectacular, and exciting, Gunga Din reaches its climax when the liveliest sergeant...
...aided by red flares and sound trucks, red-capped newsboys hawked the first issue of the Herex as a tabloid. To give the tabloid zip, Connolly turned it over to onetime Herex Managing Editor Walter Howey, immortalized as the prototype of all man-eating managing editors by Playwrights Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur in The Front Page. Lately on Hearst's executive staff, Howey had supervised the tabloid New York Mirror and the Boston Record. There are now 54 tabloids, of varying degrees of importance, on sale daily...
...Nothing Sacred" stars Carole Lombard in Ben Hecht's story of the girl who faked radium poisoning so that a New York tabloid would rescue her from Vermont and show her how America lives. If the picture is not as hilarious as advance ballyhoo led everyone to believe, it is because Frederic March takes his part as the obituary editor (and Mr. Hecht's means of de-bunking New York) altogether too seriously...
...fact alone: it brings to a wider audience Comic Bert Lahr's theory that only a barytone can chop a tree. It has other virtues as well: Jimmy Savo, exquisite pantomimist whose film career was nearly blighted two years ago by a luckless appearance in Ben Hecht's & Charles MacArthur's haphazard Once in a Blue Moon; Billy House, fleshy Mr. Bones of old-time minstrelsy; addlepated Comedienne Alice Brady; Mischa Auer, well cast as a lean and bony swami. Foster Fathers Savo, Lahr, House and Auer combine their comic efforts in cementing the romance of their...