Videoage International December 2020

8 Book Review December 2020 V I D E O A G E L isting the films that screenwriter Ben Hecht had a hand in would be a great primer on the history of motion pictures. Many film enthusiasts, from The New Yorker ’s Pauline Kael to French director Jean-Luc Godard, believe that Hecht wrote some of the shrewdest and most entertaining screenplays of the 20th century. At the inaugural Academy Awards in 1927, he won Best Screenplay for the silent gangster film Underworld . He certainly had range, with his name appearing on everything from the mob classic Scarface (1932) to the film adaptation of Wuthering Heights (1939) to Hitchcock’s psychodrama Spellbound (1945) to the screwball comedy Monkey Business (1952). And there are many others for which he was never officially credited, such as Gone With The Wind (1939) and Casino Royale (1967). Chronicling the life of someone so prolific is then no simple task. For in addition to his screenplays, Hecht completed some 30-plus books — collections of short stories, novels, and a number of theatrical plays. And yet, essayist and biographer Adina Hoffman accomplishes such a feat with Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures (264 pgs., Yale University Press, 2019, U.S.$26), which came out in paperback this year. Hoffman, who lives in Jerusalem and New Haven, Connecticut, has written four previous books, including Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City , a historical account that weaves together the lives of three architects, and My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century , a biography of the Palestinian writer Taha Muhammad Ali. Published as part of Yale Press’ “Jewish Lives” series, Hoffman’s biography of Hecht presents a discerning and perceptive look at a man with a far-reaching past as a reporter, screenwriter, and political advocate. Born in 1894 in New York City, where his parents Joseph and Sarah Hecht labored in the garment district, Hecht and his family moved to Racine, Wisconsin in 1903. Shortly after dropping out of college, the young Hecht landed a job with the help of his uncle at The Chicago Daily Journal, where he “specialized in crime and corruption in their most sensational forms,” notes Hoffman. Chicago offered Hecht an outstanding literary education. He found company in the salons of a suffragette who introduced him to his lifelong friend Maxwell Bodenheim, the then- unpublished Sherwood Anderson, and Margaret Anderson, who went on to publish the literary modernists from the U.S. and abroad in her journal The Little Review . Throughout this period, Hecht wrote his first short stories and, due to financial troubles, sent his “first commercial story” to New York-based literary magazine The Smart Set, edited by H.L. Mencken. Hoffman sees this development in Hecht’s writing life as his attempt to “produce art at the highest level and whip off fizzy yet biting entertainments” — which would become a trademark of his style for Hollywood. It was not until 1926, when Hecht was married to his second wife, Rose, and once again living in New York City, that he received a telegram asking him to write for the movies. His close friend Herman J. Mankiewicz, who famously wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane , offered him $300 a week to work for Paramount. “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots,”Mankiewicz added. Before that, Hecht had only dabbled in Tinseltown. Hoffman mentions an amusing anecdote of a time when Hecht jotted down a story idea on a used envelope for the actor Douglas Fairbanks, who then sent it to the young screenwriter Anita Loos, best known for her comic novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Hollywood showed itself to be incredibly fruitful for Hecht and his career. As Hoffman writes, “At the peak of hismovie career, Hecht was known as Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriter — he commanded as much as $125,000 for less than a month’s work in the midst of the Great Depression and at a time when the average studio writer earned approximately $120 a week.” Hecht’s offering to Hollywood was not slight either. Beyond the list of films he wrote for, he helped shape entire genres in the industry, such as “the newspaper picture, the action movie, the noir, the historical epic, the screwball comedy.” His screenplays for Underworld and Scarface would become models for The Godfather films and The Sopranos series. Elsewhere, while discussing Hecht’s opinion of the movie business, Hoffman points out that Hecht “himself condescended to the movies as a form” and likened the work to a kind of selling out. This dual character of Hecht’s feelings toward Hollywood becomes key in Hoffman’s portrait of him. “How to square Hecht’s major achievement as a screenwriter with his major contempt for film and all it entailed?” The biographer asks. “Why his compulsion not just to bite the Hollywood hand that fed him, but to shred it with his teeth?” With nuance, Hoffman addresses Hecht’s relation to his Jewish identity. The events of 1939- 1945 furnished himwith lessons, Hoffman writes, “that turned him into a Jewish radical, one of the most flamboyant and bellicose boosters of pre-1948 Palestine’s militant ultranationalist underground, the Irgun.” Hoffman takes on a critical distance in discussing Hecht’s writing later in life, especially his book Perfidy , and an incomplete manuscript entitled Shylock, My Brother . Of the latter, she notes that it “makes plain that until the very end, Hecht continued to circle restlessly around the question of where the word Jew belonged in his kaleidoscopic sense of self.” With impressive concision, Adina Hoffman draws out the genius and contradictions in Hecht to produce a multi-faceted portrait. “Ben Hecht embraced, even celebrated, being an alloy: novelist and journalist, screenwriter and activist, and, perhaps most viscerally, American and Jew, no more, no less,” Hoffman comments. Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures demonstrates the many lives that Hecht lived, as well as the numerous transitions in his writing. Whether ghostwriting Marilyn Monroe’s autobiography late in life or dashing off screenplays, Hecht never quit his writerly vocation. Author Adina Hoffman renders a thoughtful account of the life and work of Ben Hecht, a quick-witted screenwriter of Hollywood talkies and a political firebrand. A Biography of Ben Hecht Explores His Life in Hollywood and Politics By Luis Polanco