Ben Hecht
From Alfred Hitchcock Wiki
- born: 28/Feb/1894 (New York, USA)
- died: 18/Apr/1964 (New York, USA) - thrombosis
Biography
Ben Hecht was a prolific Hollywood screenwriter, even though he professed disdain for the motion picture industry. He was also a Zionist and human rights activist.
Hecht was raised in Racine, Wisconsin, and as a young man moved to Chicago, where he became a reporter and, eventually, a short-story writer and novelist. He eventually landed in New York, where he met movie mogul David O. Selznick. The two were to be lifelong friends and frequent collaborators.
Early in his career, he worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News. There he published the sensational column 1001 Afternoons in Chicago. While working at the newspaper, he met and befriended Maxwell Bodenheim. They would remain lifelong friends.
While at the Chicago Daily News, Hecht famously broke the Ragged Stranger Murder Case story. Army war hero Carl Wanderer and his wife had been assaulted by a ragged stranger. His wife and the stranger were killed in the struggled. Hecht’s investigation revealed that the stranger was actually a drifter named Al Watson whom Wanderer had hired to stage a holdup. Wanderer admitted he was a homosexual and had planned the murder of his pregnant wife. He was sentenced to death by hanging and was executed on March 19, 1921.
Hecht eventually moved to Hollywood, where he scripted Josef von Sternberg's gangster story "Underworld" in 1927, and won an Oscar for his work at the first Academy Awards presentation. His most famous work was the stage comedy "The Front Page", which he wrote with frequent collaborator Charles MacArthur. It was first translated to film in 1931 and three more times, most notably as Howard Hawks' "His Girl Friday" in 1940. Much of Hecht's later work was uncredited, as he worked as a "script doctor".
Hecht had an early talk show on television in the New York metropolitan area in the 1950s and 1960s.
Filmography
With Hitchcock...
- Foreign Correspondent (1940) - writer, final scene (uncredited)
- Lifeboat (1944) - writer (uncredited)
- Watchtower Over Tomorrow (1945) - writer
- Spellbound (1945) - screenplay
- Notorious (1946) - writer
- The Paradine Case (1947) - screenplay (uncredited)
- Rope (1948) - writer (uncredited)
- Strangers on a Train (1951) - writer (uncredited)