Tag: Ben Hecht

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Angels Over Broadcasts? Ben Hecht on the Air

I’m not sure whether I like the idea. Of me being psychic, I mean. So, I generally come up with some feeble explanation for occurrences not quite so readily explained away. I don’t like the idea of explaining things away either. What’s left to be debated or wondered about once you have gotten to the bottom of the unfathomable? If indeed you truly have. There is room for doubt; and as uncomfortable as I am in that dimly lit chamber, I keep its door unlocked—just in case something peculiar escapes that, without any such doubt, would indubitable have escaped me. This evening, for instance, I answered the question “What’s the movie tonight?”—a question generally posed to me at dinner time—by suggesting Twentieth Century (1934), said to have been George Bernard Shaw’s favorite film. The DVD has been in our library for a while and I have been waiting for just the moment to watch this screwball classic.

It was only a little later that I discovered that the screening would be a timely one, given that today, 28 February, is the birthday of Ben Hecht, who co-wrote the screenplay with Charles MacArthur. To be precise, the screenplay is based on Hecht and MacArthur’s stage comedy of that title, itself based on Napoleon of Broadway by one Charles Bruce Millholland. Anyway. My ostensible choice having having an air of the ethereal, I felt compelled to commune with the spirits by going in search of Hecht’s voice on the ether.

The writer-producer-director of Angels Over Broadway wasn’t hard to find, either. In their introduction to a reprint of Hecht’s sentimental medical mystery “The Fifteen Murderers” (first published in Collier’s Magazine in January 1943), Messrs. Ellery Queen describe its author thus:

Ben Hecht—child-prodigy[,] violinist, circus acrobat, theater owner, reporter, novelist (remember Eric Dorn?), foreign correspondent, columnist, newspaper publisher, playwright (remember The Front Page?—with co-dramatist Charles MacArthur), scenarist, and motion-picture producer, to mention in rough chronological order some of his vocations and avocations [. . .]

Regretting that Hecht “invaded the Coast of Criminalia only on rare occasions,” the editors drew the reader’s attention to the story “Actor’s Blood,” which they recommended as “sheer melodramatic fireworks.” Before the story was reworked as Actors and Sin (1952), with Hecht providing the voice-over narration, the author had narrated his own radio dramatization of it for a Suspense production starring Fredric March (24 August 1944). For Inner Sanctum Mysteries, Hecht acted as the narrator of his short story “The Specter of the Rose,” dramatized on 19 August 1946, just days prior to the premiere of the motion picture adaptation.

Hecht’s stories, stage and screenplays were often reworked for radio, and perhaps none more often than aforementioned The Front Page and its screwball remake His Girl Friday (in a 30 September 1940 Lux Radio Theater broadcast starring Claudette Colbert). As for the swift and shimmering Twentieth Century. it took off again with Elissa Landi (in a Campbell Playhouse production from 24 March 1939); even Gloria Swanson got on board, performing a scene from the play on the Big Show (31 December 1950), whose hostess, Tallulah Bankhead, had read Hecht and MacArthur’s “What Is America?” on the 29 March 1942 broadcast of Command Performance.

In 1935, Hecht and MacArthur’s musical extravaganza Jumbo, starring Jimmy Durante and featuring songs by Rogers and Hart, was lavishly staged at New York City’s giant Hippodrome, from which venue it was broadcast live in weekly instalments. As biographer William MacAdams points out, Hecht washed his hands of this production after many of his lines were cut as being not easily intelligible in such a large auditorium. He did not, however, turn a deaf ear to the medium. A few years later, he was a panellist on the quiz program Information, Please on 19 July 1938 and 30 August 1938. In the 1950s, he was interviewed for the documentary series Biography in Sound, recalling the lives of Carl Sandburg and Alexander Woollcott.

Considering his resume, it is difficult to not to be exposed to the works of Ben Hecht. That may well be an answer to my psychic experience; but, without question, I appreciate any helping hands and hints from the hereafter, especially if I am being led to a vehicle as bright as Twentieth Century. And now you’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got a reserved seat . . .

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On This Day in 1948: Radio Listeners Are Offered Free Delivery of "The Front Page"

Well, it sure was fodder for the tabloids. The case of the German cannibal, I mean, which resulted in a retrial and a life-sentence for the remaining party of one decidedly unconventional dinner date. Now, the so-called civilized world deems itself too far above bestiality to grant citizens the right to end their own lives as they see fit or to lose themselves completely in a consensual act of consuming passion. Widely exempt from the consequent criminalization of cruelty—which outlaws the animalistic it can never truly root out—remain the barbarism of capital punishment and the bane of the yellow press.

I don’t often quote journalist-turned-novelist Theodore Dreiser, mainly because his prose is among the most hideous ever to get past an editor; but this line, ripped from his Sister Carrie, is worth considering: “Our civilisation is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.”

It seems a perfectly reasonable attack on civilization; yet it is a line of attack defined by and conforming with the standards of the society it questions: a state of humanity based on the assumption that being human should mean being reasonable, the supposition that society should strive to rid individuals of their impulses and emotions—a project altogether unreasonable.

The paper logic of journalism—those well-formed, epigrammatic answers to monstrously complex questions—is as common and comforting as it is dangerous. Journalism itself is not the product of reason, but caters to the instinctual from which it derives: a curiosity at times so mean and perverse that it must be rationalized away by declaring the imagination-fertilizer being spread to constitute “news” or “information” in the public interest.

The famous American play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, a comedy as poignant today as it was back in 1928, addresses this barbarism of the press, a force so powerful that it has been known to incite wars for the purpose of reporting them.

Adapted for the rival medium of radio by noted American critic, editor, and playwright Gilbert Seldes, “The Front Page” was spread out anew, if somewhat reduced in size, on this day, 9 May, in 1948, when it was reproduced by the Ford Theater, a venue named after its sponsor and not to be confused with Ford’s Theater, the center of cultural refinement that once was the site of a Presidential assassination.

Seldes’s edition of The Front Page makes good use of the aural medium by confronting listeners with the sound of the gallows being readied for an execution, a sound overheard in a newsroom whose occupants are paid to cash in on the event.

To those in public office, the timely execution of a cop killer is politically more advantageous than any probings into the mind of the convict. To a journalist like Hildy Johnson—a man torn between the mating instinct and the reasonable goal of making a name for himself—such a hanging not only spells good news, but excitement too great to be traded in for the state of matrimony.

The Front Page is an unflattering portrayal of the newspaper racket; but, unlike Dreiser’s brand of naturalism, it does not simplify what is complex by exposing societal corruptions only to subject them to the either-or morality of didactic fictions that aim at telling us how things are to teach us how they ought to but could not be.

Comedies and melodramas—especially plays that seem aesthetically flawed and morally ambiguous because they are as muddled as our everyday—can be instructive in their willful disorder or bewildering raggedness.

I was reminded of this last night while watching Are You Listening?, a 1932 MGM melodrama in which a young writer gets tangled up in the wireless game, the broadcast medium that offers him employment but that eventually contributes to his being hunted like a social menace and convicted of manslaughter. We, the spectators, are the only witnesses to his supposed crime—but we are sentenced, after promises of romance and gaiety, to follow the fall and disgrace of some latter-day Caleb Williams, an outcast hunted by media hounds interested in something less than justice, driven to the chase by nothing more than a desire to profit from—to feed rather than satisfy—our hunger for the sensational.