April 18

Ben Hecht dies of thrombosis in New York City, 1964. He was a Chicago newspaper reporter-turned-screenwriter who moved to Hollywood after his friend Herman Mankiewicz sent him a telegram from California that read, “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.” With Charles MacArthur, Hecht wrote some of the most famous films of the thirties and forties, including His Girl Friday (1940)—based on their play The Front Page—Wuthering Heights (1939), Twentieth Century (1934), Scarface (1932) and Gunga Din (1939). His love for the Hollywood Production Code and its influences on the motion pictures of the time is not well-documented, as he had none. Here are some of his more pithy observations about the state of the art:

Two generations of Americans have been informed nightly:

• that a woman who betrayed her husband (or a husband a wife) could never find happiness
• that sex was no fun without a mother-in-law and a rubber plant around
• that women who fornicated just for pleasure ended up as harlots or washerwomen
• that any man who was sexually active in his youth later lost the one girl he truly loved
• that a man who indulged in sharp practices to get ahead in the world ended in poverty and with even his own children turning on him
• that any man who broke the laws, man's or God's, must always die, or go to jail, or become a monk, or restore the money he stole before wandering off into the desert
• that anyone who didn't believe in God (and said so out loud) was set right by seeing either an angel or witnessing some feat of levitation by one of the characters
• than an honest heart must always recover from a train wreck or a score of bullets and win the girl it loved
• that the most potent and brilliant of villains are powerless before little children, parish priests or young virgins with large boobies
• that injustice could cause a heap of trouble but it must always slink out of town in Reel Nine
• that there are no problems of labor, politics, domestic life, or sexual abnormality but can be solved happily by a simple Christian phrase or a fine American motto

March 8

George Stevens dies of a heart attack in Lancaster, California, 1975. The director of Gunga Din (1939), The More the Merrier (1943) and Giant (1956) made one of his most lauded films in 1949, the drama A Place in the Sun, based on Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy. Released in 1951, the movie starred Montgomery Clift as George Eastman, a blue collar joe with a pregnant wife (Shelley Winters), who becomes part of an upscale world that includes the beautiful Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor). “In A Place in the Sun, I was interested in the mood and emotional effect of the story,” Stevens (above, on the set) explained in a 1973 interview. “I wanted the audience to relate to a character whose behavior it might not subscribe to. To bring that about, one must let the audience see his desire. They have to know his need for that thing that, even accidentally, traps him. So how do you do those things? Cinema, at its most effective, is one scene effectively superseded by the next. Isn’t that it? The hatchet on the rope and the guillotine falls in the next cut. We have our electricity that creates a current that blows through a film. When I cut the film, I became more and more conscious of the value of one scene against another, and how this spelled something out. I wanted to edit the film in a way that meant more than the addition of one scene to another, I wanted a kind of energy to flow through. What really interested me was the relationship of images, from this one to that. Shelley Winters busting at the seams with sloppy melted ice cream in a brass bed, as against Elizabeth Taylor in a white gown with blue balloons floating from the sky. Automatically that’s an imbalance, and by imbalance you create drama. I’m interested in knowing—as visually as it can be stated—what’s on this boy’s mind.”