Word: hechts
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Invited to shed some light on why Director John Huston stomped off the set of A Farewell to Arms in a rancorous farewell to Producer David O. Selzniclc last April, Farewell Scriptwriter Ben Hecht smiled the smile of a man who can distinguish the buttered side of the bread, shed only cigar smoke: "Ah, there is an old Chinese proverb that is the best clue to the incompatibility of David and John: 'When two eagles fly off together into the sky and disappear into a cloud, who can say which flew the higher...
Sweet Smell of Success (Hecht, Hill and Lancaster; United Artists) is a high-tension jolt into the rat-eat-rat, rat-tat-tattle world of a monstrous Broadway columnist (Burt Lancaster) and his favorite hatchetman (Tony Curtis), a pressagent who has swapped his soul for a mess of items. No self-respecting vulture would be caught in the company of these carrion slingers. Says Curtis the flack of Lancaster the gossipist: "You got him for a friend; you don't need an enemy!" Says Burt to Tony: "I'd hate to take a bite...
...Bachelor Party, the second hyper-realistic effort of Hecht-Hill-Lancaster, is about the stunning weight of responsibility, and the revulsion from it, that a young man feels when his wife becomes pregnant for the first time. His protest against the complications of a home and family that are about to entangle him for life becomes a desire to sleep with a young woman he meets in Greenwich Village on the night of the party...
...Bachelor Party (Hecht-Hill-Lancaster; United Artists). Paddy Chayefsky is the Proust of The Bronx. He remembers everything-even sometimes how things really are in working-class life in the big city. He remembers concretely, with photographic eye and phonographic ear. Yet his memories seem to move him -and his audiences-in inverse proportion to their importance. He is a minusculist, with a passion for the little ideas and the Little People-apparently not so much because they are people as because they are little. But for all that, Author Chayefsky has a metropolitan instinct as keen as a pigeon...
...appeal, plays a MIG-wig in the Red air force who flies to the West in protest over a missed promotion. Bob Hope, a major in the U.S. Air Force, is assigned the "sensitive" task of inducing her to "embrace democracy." After that, the script-mostly by Ben Hecht, though he has wisely refused to acknowledge it (TIME, Oct. 15)-degenerates noisily into a lot of Hechtic foolishness. For a couple of reels the leading comedian plays it, riot for goofaws, but for the quiet snickers he is really better at getting; yet in the last half of the picture...