Word: hechts
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Specter of the Rose (Republic) is what happened when Republic handed Writer-Director-Producer Ben Hecht the price of a horse opera ($200,000) and left him strictly alone to create-if he could-a work of art. The picture rates solid A for effort, something between A and low D for quality. Parts of it will delight a limited audience...
...story is a Hecht original: a great dancer (Ivan Kirov), subject to fits of homicidal insanity, marries a budding ballerina (Viola Essen), who hopes that his dancing and her love will work a cure. Great Teacher Judith Anderson and threadbare Impresario Michael Chekhov, torn between terror and balletomania, hover unhappily in the wings. Another sideliner, Poet Lionel Stander, grates out Mr. Hecht's own highly debatable views on Love & Art, and dashes an occasional gruelly tear from his granitic eye. To climax a triumphant tour, the dancer's mind finally cracks and he turns...
...filming this sad tale, Ben Hecht intelligently cut costs and also sharpened his effects by hiring eager newcomers and first-rate but not too expensive veterans whose capacity for hard work matched his own. Chief weakness of George Antheil's alert score is the absence of Spectre's traditional music (Carl Maria von Weber's Invitation to the Waltz). Among the film's good points: young Kirov's tormented athleticism; Viola Essen's fresh beauty; the rich, workmanlike performances of Miss Anderson and Mr. Chekhov...
Swan Song (by Ben Hecht & Charles Mac Arthur; produced by John Clein) finds the authors of Twentieth Century and The Front Page collaborating on Broadway for the first time in seven years. But only as rewrite men. They have varnished up a thriller called Crescendo that thudded on the road last winter-and that is still dead wood...
Most of the evening is devoted to conversation (a handful of good Hecht & MacArthur cracks, a hunk of fancy chatter about psychiatry and art) and to pianoplaying. Twelve-year-old Jacqueline Horner plays Chopin and Mozart with precocious skill; but the concert by no means makes up for the claptrap...