of Hawaii, Manoa) traces Hecht's views back to an old debate over humannature: are we amenable to reasoned argument (the Enlightenment view) orcoerced to change only through force? Mainstream Zionism embraced theEnlightenment perspective. Hecht'ssupport for the Irgun could easily be labeled fascist, but labels don't fitwell here. Progressingfrom cynic to critic of Adolf Hitler and then militant Zionist, he worked inthe 1940s with gangster Mickey Cohen raising money to buy guns for the paramilitaryorganization Irgun in British occupied Jerusalem.
Hecht's political views were a litmus of his times. But ask todayhow many people recognize his name, or how often his books are read and theanswer is few and seldom. An award winning playwright ( TheFront Page ), prolific Hollywood screenwriter ( The Unholy Night Scarface Notorious ),journalist, and novelist, he seemed destined for posthumous fame.
NOTORIOUS SCREENWRITER BEN MOVIE
Who else but Hecht could have drawn the admiration of Ezra Pound, clowned around with Harpo Marx, written Notorious and Spellbound with Alfred Hitchcock, launched Marlon Brando?s career, ghosted Marilyn Monroe?s memoirs, hosted Jack Kerouac and Salvador Dalí on his television talk show, and plotted revolt with Menachem Begin? Any lover of modern history who follows this journey through the worlds of gangsters, reporters, Jazz Age artists, Hollywood stars, movie moguls, political radicals, and guerrilla fighters will never look at the twentieth century in the same way again.įrom the Twenties throughthe Fifties, Ben Hecht was a force of nature. It details the story of how Hecht earned admiration as a humanitarian and vilification as an extremist at this pivotal moment in history, about the origins of his beliefs in his varied experiences in American media, and about the consequences. The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist is a biography of a great twentieth-century writer that treats his activism during the 1940s as the central drama of his life. Then after the war, Hecht became notorious, embracing the labels ?gangster? and ?terrorist? in partnering with the mobster Mickey Cohen to smuggle weapons to Palestine in the fight for a Jewish state. Leveraging his talents and celebrity connections to orchestrate a spectacular one-man publicity campaign, he mobilized pressure on the Roosevelt administration for an Allied plan to rescue Europe?s Jews. But Hecht rebelled against his Jewish bosses at the movie studios when they refused to make films about the Nazi menace.
In 1932, Hecht solidified his legend as "the Shakespeare of Hollywood" with his thriller Scarface, the Howard Hughes epic considered the gangster movie to end all gangster movies.
His grim experience with what he called ?the soul of man? gave him a kind of uncanny foresight a decade later, when a loose cannon named Adolf Hitler began to rise to power in central Europe. Ben Hecht had seen his share of death-row psychopaths, crooked ward bosses, and Capone gun thugs by the time he had come of age as a crime reporter in gangland Chicago.
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