Original subtitles

Chicago in the roaring 20s was a hotbed of activity – mostly criminal.

Mobsters controlled gambling and the flow of alcohol,

and they brutally exacted their revenge on their rivals.

It was a bloody way of life for gangsters, but newspapermen had a field day.

Ben Hecht was a reporter who could find and tell great stories,

bringing the harsh realities of Chicago life onto the front page with a human dimension.

If you’re going to talk about reality, you’ve got to talk about the fullness of human character.

Hecht was sympathetic to the sense that there is a full story that is worth telling.

Exploring the human condition with words would always be important to Hecht,

even when he traded the back alleys of Chicago for Hollywood’s back-lots,

becoming tinsel-town’s most respected screenwriter.

Ben Hecht was one of the greatest dialogue writers I think in the history of movies.

He must of slid down the rain pipe to the street. No, nobody knows where he got it.

Or, if they do, they won’t talk.

Hello sweetheart, gimme the desk.

Crime Commission offers 10,000 dollars for William’s capture.

He’s the kind of screenwriter that I think so many people aspire to be even today.

At the peak of his Hollywood career, there was hardly a film of any kind that escaped Hecht’s touch.

He had a number of sides to him. There’s the comedian, there’s the expert in suspense,

there’s a kind of romantic quality to some of his work. That’s what makes him so interesting.

Ben Hecht would almost always work behind the scenes, penning some of Hollywood’s greatest classics,

and creating a body of work that to this day rings with originality and truth.

Among screenwriters, Ben Hecht stands at the top of the mountain.

He was the best. He was the best of the best.

In 1940, a comedy called His Girl Friday opened in theaters around the country,

and instantly became a Hollywood classic.

Morning Post...City Desk? Just a moment, I’ll connect you....

The film was based on a hit play by Ben Hecht and his writing partner Charles MacArthur.

Hello, Hildy, how you’ve been?

Hi, Hildy!

His Girl Friday captured a golden age of Chicago newspaper journalism, and featured Hildy Johnson,

the Morning Post’s star reporter.

What do you want?

Your ex-wife is here, do you want to see her?

Well, hello Hildy.

Hello, Walter.

Hi, Hildy.

Walter Burns is a hardened newspaper editor who will stop at nothing to get his story.

Tell him if he’ll reprieve Earl Williams we’ll support him for Senator.

What?

Tell him the Morning Post will behind him hook, line, and sinker.

But you can’t do that!

Why not?

Hecht helped create the image of the journalist in American literature

as the cynical, wise-cracking, streetwise guy with the heart of gold,

if you just get beyond that hard edge.

And this is based part on, you know, him. He was a cynical, streetwise, wise-cracking guy.

But you can’t quit the newspaper business.

Oh, why not?

Hildy Johnson has dedicated her life to journalism, but now she wants out.

Who says I can't? You’re a newspaper man.

That’s why I’m quitting. I want to go someplace where I can be a woman.

You mean be a traitor.

A traitor! A traitor to what?

A traitor to journalism, you’re a journalist, Hildy!

A journalist! Now what does that mean? Peeking through keyholes, chasing after fire engines,

waking people up in the middle of the night to ask them if Hitler’s going to start another war,

stealing pictures off old ladies? I know all about reporters, Walter.

In 1910, people got their news through newspapers – all kinds of them.

In Chicago alone there were almost a dozen, each vying for the attention of the city’s loyal readers.

It was a very competitive town with Chicago Daily News, The Tribune and The Sun,

The Times, all these different Chicago papers, dailies, going after the big bucks.

When he was just 16, Hecht got a job with the Chicago Journal as a picture chaser.

They would send out people who were employed by the papers to literally steal the photographs

of the recently deceased.

So if someone was in a streetcar accident, a driver of a milk truck gets killed,

the family might have a formal portrait he sat for, and the newspaper that got his picture in the paper

would scoop the others, sell more newspapers, make more money,

and Hecht, you know, legendarily was a transom climber.

He would go break into people's houses used to steal pictures of victims of accidents or homicides

so that the daily news could have that photo.

Hecht soon realized that getting the photograph was not so different from getting the story,

and so it didn’t take long for him to become the paper’s best writer.

When Ben Hecht was at a crime scene, and the body had been taken away,

everybody else would see the chalk outline on the sidewalk.

He would see the guy who drew the chalk outline. He would see from that chalk outline,

how the guy was killed, and from that he would see the social forces behind whatever happened.

And that’s what makes him such a great Chicago writer.

Chicago was a wild and wooly town run by crooked politicians, where gangland killings were the norm.

There was one magazine that warned any potential visitors,

you better wear a bullet proof vest if you’re coming to Chicago

because of the gang warfare, because there’s random shooting in the streets.

Hecht wrote about it all.

Beginning in 1920, at the height of his newspaper career with the Chicago Daily News,

he penned a daily column called “A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago.”

His stories captured the lives of everyone from the powerful and politically connected

to those on the bottom rung of society.

“They were hunting him. Squads of coppers with rifles, detectives,

stool pigeons were hunting him.

And the people who had read the story in the newspapers and looked at his picture,

they too, were hunting him.”

Any one of Hecht’s daily articles could have surfaced as the plot of His Girl Friday.

It’s one of these stories that journalists can tell because they’ve been in on everything.

It’s a story of the pending execution of a man, allegedly an anarchist.

You didn’t mean to kill that policeman.

Why of course not. It’s against everything I’ve ever stood for.

They know it was an accident. I’m not guilty, it’s…it’s just the world.

Earl Williams is a lowly worker who has cracked under too much pressure

and murdered a cop and is now slated to die.

But on the eve of his execution, Williams escapes, and pandemonium ensues.

And each of the men in the pressroom is trying to get the story to their paper first.

Who got away, who was it?

Earl Williams!

Hello, hello hello. Hurry up hurry up, this is important.

Give me the desk!

Flash! Earl Williams just escaped.

Jailbreak!

Don't know yet.

Call you back.

Williams took...

Went over the wall.

I don't know anything yet!

Call you back.

The story is too good for Hildy Johnson to pass up, and before she knows it,

the world of newspaper reporting has pulled her right back in.

Walter? Walter, Hildy. Earl Williams just escaped from the county jail.

Ya, ya, ya! Don’t worry, I’m on the job!

It’s one of those things where, because a reporter has been out in the world,

hearing stories and experiencing these things, he can layer over several different

events into one really compelling narrative.

And that’s one of the things Hecht was best at.

Duffy, get set. We’ve got the biggest story in years.

Earl Williams captured by the morning post. Exclusive, yea!

And I want you to tear out the whole front page.

If you look at His Girl Friday, it's as fresh and funny today as it was the day they made it,

you know, I mean, it's a great movie.

Remember, if you change your mind I’m leaving on the nine o’clock train.

If you want me Bruce, you’ve got to take me as I am instead of trying to change me into something else.

I’m no suburban Bridge player, I’m a newspaperman.

Unlike his main character, after 15 years of being a reporter,

Ben Hecht was able to pack-up and leave the world of newspapers, and Chicago.

Hollywood, 1926.

The movie industry was still young, and feature films were silent.

The huge success of His Girl Friday was almost 15 years away.

In November of that year, Hecht had received a telegram that changed his life.

His friend Herman J. Mankiewicz had just started a new job in Hollywood,

writing titles for silent pictures.

Mankiewicz wrote him to the effect that, “will you accept $300 a week to work for Paramount,

all expenses paid?

The $300 is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here, and your only competition is idiots.

Don’t let this get around.”

Hecht bit at the offer, and less than a month later, he was in Los Angeles.

He felt that he brought something that Hollywood didn’t have,

which was this sense of realism. Coming from Chicago, this real city,

as opposed to Los Angeles, as opposed to Hollywood. Right? Evan as opposed to New York.

And so his credentials as a Chicago reporter gave him something that no one in Hollywood had.

Hecht quickly set to work on his first script, drawing on his experience as a newsman.

He knew about writing under deadlines, which was imperative

in the world of Chicago newspapers,

but also imperative in the world of Hollywood screenwriting.

He could get it done quickly, but that’s not enough, of course.

His writing in newspapers was pithy, it was character driven.

And he brought that sense of character into his screenwriting.

These guys knew about life from life,

you know, if you were a crime reporter in Chicago, you saw a lot of life,

and you could put that into movies.

Hecht got a job writing a film whose subject he knew something about – the mob.

But Hecht, by now an artist with words, couldn’t use them for dialogue.

The film, Underworld, was silent.

In a film like Underworld, you see someone who’s already

putting together a movie in terms of the pictures,

not necessarily thinking in terms of dialogue.

He would be a fabulous dialogue writer later on,

but instinctually Ben Hecht got it from the time he came to Hollywood.

He had that innate sense of what a movie should be

in terms of its visual qualities, from the very beginning.

Underworld tells the story of a Chicago gangland figure, Bull Weed,

whose character, thanks to Hecht, comes across as multi-dimensional.

If you have a bad guy whose got some likeable traits,

or a hero who has some flaws, that makes a much more interesting character.

So that character that George Bancroft plays in Underworld is interesting because

you shouldn’t really like him, but you do,

and you shouldn’t really root for him, but you do.

That’s part of why the film is so good.

And that’s what makes Hecht’s gangster films stand out from so many of the others.

Hecht was so successful in his transition to film,

that at the first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929,

he won the best screenwriting award for Underworld.

A year later, when Hollywood made the transition to talkies,

Hecht gave a voice to Scarface,

based on Chicago gangster Al Capone, someone he had known from his days as a reporter.

With the coming of sound, there were new vistas for depicting this world.

You could hear the police sirens, the screech of tires,

the rat tat tat of machine guns, and the rat tat tat of the dialogue, too.

Hey look it. They got machine guns you can carry.

If I had some of them I could run the whole works in a month.

And the public took to it.

Americans were captivated by gangsters during the 1930s.

Their gangland wars over the control of alcohol during prohibition made front page news.

But when the country was hit with an economic depression,

audiences started to look for something to raise their spirits.

Hollywood’s answer was the screwball comedy.

Screwball comedies were really kind of connected umbilically to the Depression era.

There was always kind of a romantic component to them.

And they were about the love chase.

The team of Hecht and his longtime writing partner Charles MacArthur

had been successful on Broadway as well as Hollywood,

and they adapted another of their hit plays into one of the very first screwball comedies.

Twentieth Century lampooned life in the theater,

and their script was so good that one of Hollywood’s leading dramatic actors

broke with tradition, and took a chance on comedy.

I’ll bring her back, wherever she is.

No, put me back in the bull ring, sew me up like a Picador’s horse,

blind me eyes, let life run over me.

Lily, Lily!

I love John Barrymore. He’s just fantastic in that movie. He holds nothing back.

Take that name off. Black it out!

He’s just so flamboyant. He’s so incredibly outrageous.

Anathema! Chimes of Satan!

This is a guy who had just done his generation’s greatest Hamlet on Broadway.

Barrymore’s gamble with Hecht’s script helped to launch the screwball comedy,

and by 1940 the form had reached its peak with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in His Girl Friday.

I do believe it is Cary Grant’s, one of his great performances. I mean it’s just wonderful work.

You say that again, I’ll come over there and kick you in the teeth.

Say, what kind of language is that?

You know, he’s whinnying like a horse and he’s frenetic, and yet he’s very dapper.

Duffy! How do you like that, messing around with some big…Duffy!

Will you shut up? I’m trying to hear.

Duffy! That’s cooperation. Duffy!

Screwball comedies were noted for their fast-paced dialogue, and His Girl Friday clocks in as the fastest ever.

They’ll be naming streets after you. Hildy Johnson Street. There’ll be statues of you in the park.

The movies will be after you and the radio. By tomorrow morning I betchya there’s a Hildy Johnson Cigar.

I can see the billboards now. It’ll say Light Up with Hildy Johnson.

Oh Walter, will you stop that acting. We got a lot to do.

Now you’re talking.

By 1940, Hecht was one of Hollywood’s most prolific and highest paid screenwriters,

writing or polishing over 50 films, in every different genre.

There is no kind of film he couldn’t write. And I doubt that there’s any kind of film he didn’t write,

if you look at that long list of credits.

When a producer thought a script needed improving, when a director wanted one last revision

to try to add some spice, some humor, to a screenplay, he’d be called in.

Or if they were in trouble with a story, and couldn’t solve, or resolve, a storyline, he’d be called in.

He was such a craftsman. He understood storytelling so well

and he understood movie storytelling so well that he could as often as not give them just what they needed.

Ben Hecht had risen to the top of the Hollywood heap, and could pick and choose his assignments.

But when America entered World War II, he applied his sophisticated writing skill,

not for the money, but to raise public awareness about something that deeply troubled him,

the genocide of European Jews.

During World War II, there was an enormous amount of denial in American political culture

about what was going on in occupied Europe and Germany itself with the Jews.

And Hecht knew, as a lot of people did know,

that a tragedy of vast proportions was going on in Europe.

Hecht saw and knew from refugees, from people who were in touch with people in Europe,

that millions of people were being wiped out and it was outrageous to him.

Hecht, himself a Jew, was one of the few voices to bring the tragedy to the public light,

penning full-page ads that ran throughout the United States.

He then authored a live pageant called “We Will Never Die,”

calling on his connections with movie stars and other artists to speak out about the unfolding massacre.

The Germans have promised to deliver to the world by the end of the year a Christmas package

of 4 million dead Jews.

It is a problem that belongs to humanity and it is a challenge to the soul of man.

Official America really didn’t want that pageant to go on, largely,

but he got it up and on its feet.

It played huge venues at Madison Square Garden in New York, the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles,

all kinds of stops in between.

After the war, Hecht continued to speak out about the plight of the Jews.

Britain controlled the territory of Palestine,

and during the violence of 1947, Hecht condemned Britain,

and supported radical Zionist factions in their fight for a new homeland there.

It was a controversial stance that put Hecht under pressure from the British press.

Mr. Hecht, you’re on record as saying that every time a bomb exploded in Palestine,

you had a holiday in your heart. Is that still true?

It wasn’t true then. I didn’t say that.

This was garbled up in a series of ads that were published at the time.

I was involved at that time with the massacre of the Jews in Germany,

and out of the emotion that that generated I lent my voice to the Jews

who were fighting for something somewheres else.

Mr. Hecht, do you think that murder is ever justified?

I think valor is always justified.

Hecht's bame became persona-non-grata in Britain.

He couldn't necessarily work openly in Hollywood.

His name on a list of credits would have been enough to get the picture banned

definitely in England and possibly elsewhere. So, you know, it cost him.

For the rest of his career, Hecht went uncredited on many of the films he worked on.

But World War II also brought Hecht opportunity.

Even though the horrors of the war had all but put an end to the fun and frivolity of the screwball comedy,

a new film style emerged that played into the public’s fear of evil and unseen forces.

It’s far from coincidental that what we now think of as film noir

started to take root during World War II,

and flourished in the years after the war.

There were a lot of people who had gone overseas, came back changed men.

Not as bright-eyed or optimistic and openhearted as they once were.

And all that’s expressed in film noir, that suddenly

Hollywood is not focusing on the sun splashed streets of Anytown, U.S.A.,

but instead the dark alleys,

and the nighttime, and the shadows, and the shadowy figures who populate the urban landscape.

You have characters who are trapped in a world in which nothing is as it appears,

surrounded by characters who are not what they seem to be either,

and in many cases are out to get them one way or another.

The dark themes of film noir were a perfect fit with the cynicism Ben Hecht had cultivated

as a hard-boiled newspaperman, and in 1946,

he began collaborating with director Alfred Hitchcock, on a film called Notorious.

And Hitchcock, when he found a writer that he liked and had a simpatico with, he tended to work with them more than once.

He often said that the writing was, for him, the essential part of the process

and in many ways, his favorite part of the process,

because it was then he was working out all of his ideas.

For Hitchcock, plot was all-important, and so for Notorious,

Hecht created a menacing and intricate story in the dark, film noir style.

Something must be done about Emil.

A group of escaped senior Nazi officials have taken up residence in Brazil

where they plot to do something sinister with the uranium that they are smuggling in wine bottles.

Ingrid Bergman plays an alcoholic heroine, Alicia Huberman.

How am I doing?

Not bad.

Scared?

No.

Oh, oh you’re not scared of anything.

Not too much.

One of the really great things about Notorious is the characters that Hecht created.

With Alicia, she’s a party girl, just trying to drink her life away,

living a kind of frivolous, degenerate lifestyle.

Into Alicia’s life comes T.R. Devlin, an American agent played by Cary Grant,

whose job is to recruit Alicia as a spy, and then work with her to obtain information.

I’m no stool pigeon Mr. Devlin.

My department authorized me to engage you to do some work for us. There’s a job in Brazil.

Oh, go away the whole thing bores me.

He’s a professional. He’s very serious about what he’s doing,

but he falls in love with her very quickly and then he has this conflict

between what he has to accomplish from a professional point of view and his personal feelings for this woman.

Prescott wants me over right away.

Did he say what about?

No.

Maybe it’s our assignment.

Probably.

Hecht’s plot thickens when Devlin must go along with a plan

where Alicia will marry Alexander Sebastian, leader of the Nazi ring.

What is it Devlin, what’s the matter?

I don’t know if she’ll do it.

What do you mean you don’t think she…you haven’t discussed it with her have you?

No, I didn’t know what the job was until this moment.

I think you better go back to Miss Huberman and explain to her what she has to do.

I, ah...

What is it?

Nothing, sir.

Oh, I thought you were going to say something.

The stakes are raised when Sebastian discovers that his new wife is an American agent,

and that she is on to his fiendish plot.

He begins to slowly poison her rather than risk exposing his own stupidity to his evil conspirators.

Then, Hecht constructed a scene so tense it might explode at any moment

as Devlin braves the Nazi lair to save Alicia.

As the two make their way to safety,

Sebastian must cooperate, lest he draw the attention of his partners.

You’re on the edge of your seat ‘cause you don’t know what’s going to happen next, but he did.

And that’s the master storyteller.

The master storyteller knows what's coming, and knows how to set the audience up

to both be surprised and shocked,

and then to see the inevitability of what just happened and how it couldn’t have gone any other way.

As Hecht’s hero and heroine slip through their captor’s clutches,

Alexander Sebastian is summoned by his cohorts who have realized his clumsy mistake,

and will undoubtedly murder him for it.

You begin to feel for him. He gets caught in between his mother, the Nazis,

and his love for this woman, and so forth.

On the surface, it might seem odd that someone like Ben Hecht, the ultimate Hollywood Zionist,

would write a Nazi character, the one played by Claude Raines, with an ounce of sympathy, or half ounce even.

But he was a storyteller first and foremost.

There’s no question he’s the bad guy. That’s never an issue.

But he’s a human being,

and as a human being he has many facets and that’s what Hecht and Hitchcock understood

about making a really good character come to life.

And so it’s a brilliant kind of character study wrapped up in a thriller,

done in a film noir style by a master filmmaker

with a script that I think is just one of the best scripts, certainly of the 1940s, and maybe of all time.

Hecht would go on writing and doctoring Hollywood screenplays until his death in 1964.

Because he often went uncredited, we may never know the complete number of scripts that received the Hecht touch,

but the documented number exceeds 80.

Hildy, this is war. You can’t desert me now.

Oh, Walter, will you get off that trapeze. You’ve got your story right over there in the desk.

Go on, smear it all over the front page.

His ear for the language, his ear for dialogue, his eye for the scene and what’s really going on,

and his really deep human heart enabled him to put down on paper things that will endure forever

because he got to the essence of things.

From his newspaper stories to big budget Hollywood scripts, it was Ben Hecht’s talent for telling a good story

that earned him a place among America’s best writers,

a talent that continues to entertain and engage us to this day.

If you look at his body of work, he was one of the real giants

of a period that was filled with giants.

And so for me, he will always be the screenwriter par excellence.