Ben Hecht
(New York, 1894- id ., 1964) American narrator, comedy writer, screenwriter and filmmaker.Ben Hecht was born into a family of circus and variety artists, and was a child prodigy of the violin.At a very young age, he settled in Chicago, was an active part of the cultural movement of the early 1920s and published stories in magazines such as The Little Review and Smart Set .
Ben Hecht
He was in Berlin during the revolutionary movements of 1919, and he captured this experience in his novel Erik Dorn (1921).In 1923 he founded the Chicago Literary Times .His main narrative works belong to this period: Humbty Dumpty (1924), Count Bruga (1926) and the series 1001 Afternoons in Chicago (1923 ).
More than for his narrative, characterized by a style that is not always careful and often excessive, Ben Hecht stands out for his theatrical texts and his film scripts.In 1928 he wrote Front page in collaboration with Charles MacArthur, a work that brought him great success and was made into a film in different versions; the most memorable, without a doubt, is the one directed by Billy Wilder in 1974, starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.
Also with MacArthur he wrote Twentieth Century in 1933 (work from which both reworked the script for the film of the same title, directed by Howard Hawks in 1934), and at the following year he founded a film production company.From that moment on, the activity of Ben Hecht and MacArthur focused for the most part on the scripts of films that would later become famous: The Law of the Underworld (1927), Scarface (1932), Gunga Din (1939), Wuthering Heights (1941), Remember (1945), Chained (1946), Farewell to Arms (1957), and his biography A Child of the Century (1954).
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