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“В Доме горбатых называли Ангелами, подразумевая сложенные крылья, и это была одна из немногих ласковых кличек, которые Дом давал своим детям."

#the house in which #дом в котором #горбач #gorbach #Illustration #art #graphic art

The screenwriter, Chicago newspaperman and playwright helped invent the gangster genre. As two new Hecht biographies reveal, he was also a key, controversial voice of Jewish activism and Israeli statehood "propagandist" (his word) before, during and after the Holocaust

Article is a look at both books on Hecht in the context of Chicago. A fine piece

#Ben Hecht #biographies #Gorbach #Purdue University Press

Notorious Ben Hecht-Oscar for 1st modern gangster movie

HECHT RECEIVES OSCAR FOR 1st modern Gangster movie.

Hecht's Underworld is considered the first modern gangster movie. Though it opened with modest hopes, it garnered massive box-office success, and Hecht would receive an Oscar for best original story at the first Academy Awards ceremony, on May 16, 1929. “Here’s to crime,” wrote a reviewer for Motion Picture Classic. “Ever since Underworld came through with flying colors, most every producer including its particular sponsor, Paramount, has been trying to duplicate it.”

In Hecht’s follow-up, Scarface, written after the stock market crash, he would push into far darker territory, appealing to a more sophisticated, or more jaundiced, audience. The differences between the two films reflect the contrasts between Hecht’s worldview before and after his experience in Germany, as well as the changes wrought by Prohibition in Chicago. While Underworld had portrayed the gritty era of the First Ward and the Gangsters’ Ball, Scarface depicted corporate criminal syndicates that had developed in response to the Volstead Act, engulfing the power structures of the city.

The result was a culture and politics suffused with crime. Scarface capitalized on the cult of personality around Al Capone, notorious for a ruthlessness that was a mix of icy calculation and ferocity. The film capitalized, as well, on the public’s appetite for violence. Its gangsters were not merely thugs but veterans of a world war, armed with its firepower and trained in military tactics. In short, whether consciously or not, Hecht’s terrifying vision of Scarface protagonist Tony Camonte and his mob was in many ways suggestive of Hitler and the Nazis, just when Hitler was poised to seize power. Like the Nazis, Camonte was a creature of the world war, born of that combination of mad viciousness and modern efficiency. Like Hitler, Camonte is a media obsession with a genius for manipulating public opinion.

But ironically, as a powerful figure who challenges the state, Camonte would also endure as Hecht’s iconic outlaw, the fearsome and fearless type Hecht would one day turn to for help when the Jews were in need. In both roles this American movie gangster, like his real-life German counterpart, personified all that had gone wrong in the world. Underworld had struck a chord because Hecht understood America’s fascination with the soul of the racketeer. His own Menckenesque contempt for hypocritical puritan morality had put him at the center of a revolution in morals and manners under way in the 1920s. Gone was the gentility of the Victorian age. After the war, a new, modern urban culture. (Below scene from Underworld)