Word: hechts
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Nothing less savage-or less funny -than Anthony Hecht's couplet commentary on Aesop, the slave as moralist, should introduce this small masterpiece on man's ingenious cruelty to man. Yambo Ouologuem (pronounced Oo-o-lo-guem), born 30 years ago in the French Sudan, now the Republic of Mali, writes from the point of view of victim. But what a victim...
...pleasant way to while away an evening. The Sheldon Harnick-Jerry Bock score neatly dovetails into the book, but it lacks any single rousing number like "Tradition" from their Fiddler on the Roof score. Hal Linden is warmly convincing as a Jewish Joe Kennedy. Except for Nathan Rothschild (Paul Hecht), the brother in London, the sons are not individually distinct. Absent from the stage of the Lunt-Fontanne Theater are two favorite Rothschilds-Mouton and Lafite...
...word in Latin and penny-press barons waged ferocious circulation wars with gory headlines and salacious scoops. Everyone, that is, except people who know Tom Fitzpatrick of the Chicago Sun-Times. At 42, "Fitz" seems to be a character straight from the typewriters of Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht, reporting, writing, drinking and brawling in the best Front Page tradition. "Yeah," he says. "I'm out of my time. I would have been great 30 years ago." Perhaps, but the Pulitzer committee, which last week awarded him the prize for local general reporting, seems to think he is pretty...
...twisting. Freelance Writer Hunter Thompson portrays French Ski Champion Jean-Claude Killy as a Chevy promoter (and describes Playboy magazine, which rejected the piece, as "a conspiracy of anemic masturbators"). There is a thoughtful history of Biafra, a long biography of Gangster Mickey Cohen by the late Ben Hecht, even a serialized comic strip. "The first number was supposed to be 80 pages," says Zion, "but we went up to 136 because we just didn't want to kill the stuff...
Like Ben, Abram S. Ginnes' manic screenplay brims with hellishly good intentions that never quite come off. Jewison has thus been forced to pare his film drastically. Plot and continuity skip along in a flurry of quick cuts and undeveloped skits. Perhaps it is just as well. Hecht was invariably sodden with sentimentality except when he wrote with a collaborator-as in The Front Page. In editing Gaily, Gaily, Jewison has played a latter-day Charles MacArthur to Hecht's Hecht...