For understandable reasons, biographies about Ben Hecht have focused almost exclusively on his screenwriting career in Hollywood. And why wouldn't they? Consider a few of his credits: “Underworld,” directed by Josef von Sternberg, for which Hecht won the first Academy Award. (Not his first Academy Award, the first Academy Award ever given for best story. The year was 1927.) “Scarface,” “The Front Page,” “Twentieth Century,” “Design for Living,” “Wuthering Heights,” “His Girl Friday,” “Spellbound,” “Notorious.” And that's just films with his name on them. Uncredited, he script-doctored countless others, including “Stagecoach,” “Gone With the Wind,” “A Star Is Born” (1937) and “Roman Holiday.”
Across four decades, Hecht worked on about 200 movies. He helped establish the ground rules for entire genres, including the gangster film, the newspaper picture, the screwball comedy and postwar film noir. Jean-Luc Godard said “he invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today.”
However, what gets repeatedly overlooked, when historians and film buffs consider Hecht's life, are his politics. That's understandable too, given that he hated politics. Thanks to his early days as a Chicago newspaperman, he came to believe that all politicians were hopelessly corrupt. He was deeply cynical about the human condition, and didn't take do-gooders seriously. He dismissed the fashionable leftism among Hollywood's screenwriting elite as group therapy for intellectuals.
But unexpectedly, in middle age, Hecht dropped everything to become a propagandist and political organizer, in a nationwide campaign to pressure the Roosevelt administration to rescue the endangered Jews of Europe. His dramatic transformation surprised his friends and colleagues, and may reveal more about the man than any of his Hollywood successes.
Two new books finally give this chapter of his life the emphasis it deserves. “Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures,” by Adina Hoffman, an accomplished literary biographer, and “The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist,” by the first-time author Julien Gorbach, a crime reporter turned journalism professor, both play down Hecht's screenwriting in order to dig more deeply into his relatively unexplored Jewish side.
But as these biographies clearly show, Hecht's Jewish American identity runs like a soundtrack through his entire life. He once joked that he became a Jew only in 1939, yet in fact he was pickled in Yiddishkeit from the beginning. Born on the Lower East Side, raised in the Midwest, he wrote novels, short stories and newspaper columns about Jews throughout his life; Sholom Aleichem was an enduring inspiration.
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