On Gorbach's The Notorious Ben Hecht

Ben Hecht (1893–1964) was known as the "Shakespeare of Hollywood." Versatile and fast-writing, Hecht was regularly called on to punch out a quick script and whip others into shape. In addition to 60 screen credits, Hecht contributed to over 140 films, including rewriting the last nine reels of Gone with the Wind (1939). He also authored 10 novels and roughly 250 short stories, collaborated on a dozen memoirs, scribed some 20 Broadway shows, scripted several radio dramas and TV serials, and wrote many articles, speeches, and newspaper columns. During the 1940s, Hecht played a central role in breaking US media silence on Nazi atrocities, and after the war he became a militant Zionist, feverishly penning propaganda materials and partnering with Jewish gangster Mickey Cohen to arm Palestinian Jews.

Gorbach's impressive biography is not the first book-length study of Ben Hecht, which include Adina Hoffman's Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures, also published in 2019, and two older works: William MacAdams's Ben Hecht: The Man Behind the Legend (1990) and Doug Fetherling's appreciation The Five Lives of Ben Hecht (1977). Hecht completed his own massive memoir in 1953, A Child of the Century, which was reprinted in 2020. That reprinting and the books by Gorbach and Hoffman suggest a renewed interest in Hecht after decades of academic indifference.

Hecht's current appeal is partly rooted in resonances between his time and our own. Through his fictional, nonfictional, journalistic, and propagandistic writings, Hecht stirred up, aggravated, and brought attention to social and political issues that are again at the fore: the polarization of Jews in America and (prestate) Israel; debates about the role, responsibility, and tone of the press; disenchantment with elected officials (especially reevaluations of Roosevelt's actions during the Holocaust); and questions concerning what to do when laws are unjust, police officers behave like criminals, and governments and corporations are more rapacious than crime syndicates.

In his day, Hecht accused Churchill and Roosevelt of being complicit in genocide, called out mainstream Zionists for misplacing their faith in liberal democracy and international law, championed the "tough Jew" in America and "New Jew" of the Middle East, and lamented the conformity and social climbing that went hand in hand with assimilation and cosmopolitanism. At different stages, Hecht was called an un-Jewish Jew, Jewish antisemite, fascist, nihilist, cynic, and hack. Although he considered himself a liberal, he was perpetually disappointed by the apparent moral palsy of politicians, newspapers, and Jewish organizations that seemed driven by their own interests more than by the urgent matters of the day. Hecht wanted to believe in the US president, an upstanding press, and basic human decency, but he turned to polemics, propaganda, and extremism when those hopes were unrealized.

According to Gorbach, Hecht's turbulent persona, unconventional alliances, and complicated reputation stemmed from a self-styled romanticism. During his Chicago newspaper days, Hecht grew increasingly skeptical of the public's receptivity to reason and the concept of reason itself. Without studying the terms or their history, Hecht intuitively articulated a Romantic rejection of Enlightenment ideals, favoring emotion over reason, subjectivity over objectivity, and the individual over society. Gorbach posits that, had Hecht stumbled on Romanticism in a textbook, he would have embraced the definition: "the rejection of civilized corruption, and a desire to return to natural primitivism and escape the spiritual destruction of urban life" (285).

Gorbach's meticulously researched book consists of four parts divided into nineteen chapters, plus extensive front- and backmatter. The endnotes alone span over 100 pages. Part I explores Hecht's early career as a war correspondent in Berlin (1918–1919) and crime reporter in Chicago. During these formative years, Hecht became increasingly cynical, balked at the idea of a duty-bound democratic press, showed flashes of propagandistic proclivities, and developed an affinity for gangsters who challenged the state. These experiences informed some of his early Hollywood successes, including Underworld (1927), The...