The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (186 page)

Of course, this is a career that could easily succumb to the volatility of her life. With so much melodrama here, there, and along the highways of California, there needs to be no doubt about her acting. But it was only the stalwart loyalty of Harrison Ford that kept her in
Six Days, Seven Nights
(98, Ivan Reitman), after her romance with Ellen DeGeneres had gone public. And she and Ford did have chemistry. On the other hand, she has had far too much public disorder.

She began in theatre as a child, and she played twins in the TV soap opera
Another World
, so she knows strangeness. Her earlier movies are:
The Adventures of Huck Finn
(93, Stephen Sommers);
Against the Wall
(94, John Frankenheimer), for TV;
Milk Money
(94, Richard Benjamin);
Girls in Prison
(94, John McNaughton);
I’ll Do Anything
(94, James L. Brooks);
The Investigator
(95, Matthew Tabak);
Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long
(95, Thomas Schlamme);
Wild Side
(95, Donald Cammell);
Pie in the Sky
(96, Bryan Gordon); very good with Catherine Keener in
Walking and Talking
(96, Nicole Holofcener);
The Juror
(96, Brian Gibson);
Volcano
(97, Mick Jackson);
I Know What You Did Last Summer
(97, Jim Gillespie).

The work ranged from the enterprising to the trashy, but who knows why she thought to be Janet Leigh in
Psycho
(98, Gus Van Sant)? She was far better in
The Third Miracle
(99, Agnieszka Holland), and she directed DeGeneres and Sharon Stone in
If These Walls Could Talk II
(00). Since then, with other calls (such as marriage and childbirth), she has done
One Kill
(00, Christopher Menaul);
Beyond Suspicion
(00, Tabak);
Prozac Nation
(05, Erik Skjoldbjaerg);
John Q
(02, Nick Cassavetes); outstanding in
Birth
(04, Jonathan Glazer);
Sexual Life
(04, Ken Kwapis). She played Lily Garland in a Broadway revival of
Twentieth Century
in early 2004.

Since then she has played in the TV series
Men in Trees
(2006–08);
What Love Is
(07, Mars Callahan);
Suffering Man’s Charity
(07, Alan Cumming);
Superman/Doomsday
(07, Bruce Timm);
Toxic Skies
(08, Andrew C. Erin);
Spread
(09, David Mackenzie).

Ben Hecht
(1893–1964), b. New York
1934:
Crime Without Passion
. 1935:
The Scoundrel; Once in a Blue Moon
. 1936:
Soak the Rich
(all codirected with Charles MacArthur). 1940:
Until I Die; Angels Over Broadway
(codirected with Lee Garmes). 1946:
Specter of the Rose
. 1952:
Actors and Sin
(codirected with Garmes).

In the suspicious relations between the American intelligentsia and its national cinema, Ben Hecht plays a fascinating but ambivalent part. He had a quick-witted, plot-making skill that was as welcome and highly paid in Hollywood as its practitioners were despised or ignored. Hecht responded savagely: scorning the films on which he worked; deploring the effect of movies on theater, American cultural standards, and his own creative career; scathing but living off its follies de dollars; using Oscars as doorstops; and, most sadly, failing in an attempt to beat it at its own game.

It is easy to claim that
Citizen Kane
taught Americans that their own cinema could be dignified. But Pauline Kael’s book on that film shows how far the bitter spirit of the New York wordsmith still curdles. Thus Kael quotes the telegram that Herman Mankiewicz sent to Hecht in 1926, still with a sense of needing to be superior to the film world’s extravagance: “Will you accept 300 per week to work for Paramount Pictures? All expenses paid. 300 is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.” Mankiewicz, Hecht, and Kael never forgave the financial draw of those idiots, and never saw that there were great talents working in Hollywood unabashed by lurid salaries. All credit to Mankiewicz for the malicious original of
Kane
, but it is a finished work by Welles. And if Hecht deserves to be regarded as the most variedly successful of screenwriters, his best work is still subordinate to the cinematic achievement of Hawks, Hitchcock, and Preminger.

Hecht’s first job was to write the story that Sternberg made into
Underworld
(27). He pocketed the $10,000 for a week’s work and accepted the Oscar for the story, but reviled the system that could reward such hurried work so lavishly. His mistake was to lump Sternberg in with inflated salaries and pretentious awards. What hurt most was the realization that the writer in movies had everything but power. His bitterness overcame him and stopped him from seeing the vastly greater visual contribution that lay in Sternberg’s control.

Hecht was raised in Chicago, with a career in journalism and as a novelist, as well as friendship with the young David Selznick before he answered Mankiewicz’s cable. His first success with
Underworld
and his facility for turning out clever plots and dialogue kept him in demand:
The Big Noise
(28, Allan Dwan);
The Unholy Night
(29, Lionel Barrymore);
The Great Gabbo
(29, James Cruze); and
Roadhouse Nights
(30, Hobart Henley). In 1928, in collaboration with Charles MacArthur (1895–1956), he had written the play,
The Front Page
, which, in 1931, Lewis Milestone filmed. Hecht carried on as story-or scriptwriter on
Scarface
(32, Hawks), which he wrote in eleven days;
Topaze
(33, Harry d’Arrast);
Hallelujah, I’m a Bum
(33, Milestone);
Design for Living
(33, Ernst Lubitsch), from the Noel Coward play; and
Viva Villa!
(34, Jack Conway and Hawks).

In 1934, Hecht and MacArthur adapted their play for Hawks’s
Twentieth Century
, and established their own New York production company that made
Crime Without Passion
and
The Scoundrel
, both photographed by Lee Garmes. The latter, starring Noel Coward, is a splendid black comedy, and Hecht’s best direction. Otherwise, the films he made with MacArthur and Lee Garmes only illustrate the limits of a top writer and cameraman.
Twentieth Century
is a masterpiece of sexual antagonism made from a funny but limited play about a ham actor. Hecht was to direct four more pictures—two of them with Garmes—but the precision and confidence of his written material is absent from those films, whereas it flourishes in, say,
His Girl Friday, Notorious
, and
Whirlpool
.

He continued to supply scripts for the West Coast: the disappointing
Barbary Coast
(35, Hawks);
The Florentine Dagger
(35, Robert Florey), an adaptation of one of his own novels; the pungently funny
Nothing Sacred
(37, William Wellman), which pursued his favorite theme of hypocrisy in the media;
The Goldwyn Follies
(38, George Marshall); with MacArthur again on
Gunga Din
(39, George Stevens); with Herman Mankiewicz on
It’s a Wonderful World
(39, W. S. Van Dyke);
Lady of the Tropics
(39, Conway); with MacArthur making Brontë bland for Goldwyn’s
Wuthering Heights
(39, William Wyler); and
Comrade X
(40, King Vidor).

In the same year, Hawks made
His Girl Friday
, a variation on
Front Page
, scripted by Charles Lederer, turning it into a male-female confrontation. The viewers must judge for themselves, both the virtues of the Hecht/MacArthur original and the deepening (or not) of the Hawks movie.

From about this time, Hecht began to be involved on poorer and plainer pictures:
Lydia
(41, Julien Duvivier);
Tales of Manhattan
(42, Duvivier);
The Black Swan
(42, Henry King); and
China Girl
(42, Henry Hathaway). Then he scripted two Hitchcock films:
Spellbound
(45) and the magnificent
Notorious
(46), arguably his best screenplay. Next,
Ride the Pink Horse
(47, Robert Montgomery);
Kiss of Death
(47, Hathaway), more violent than any of Hecht’s other films;
The Miracle of the Bells
(48, Irving Pichel);
Whirlpool
(49, Preminger);
Perfect Strangers
(50, Bretaigne Windust), from a play written with MacArthur;
Where the Sidewalk Ends
(50, Preminger);
Monkey Business
(52, Hawks), which he wrote with Lederer and I. A. L. Diamond; as one of several dispirited writers on
Ulysses
(54, Mario Camerini);
The Indian Fighter
(55, André de Toth);
Miracle in the Rain
(56, Rudolph Maté);
The Iron Petticoat
(56, Ralph Thomas);
Legend of the Lost
(57, Hathaway);
A Farewell to Arms
(57, Charles Vidor)—the last of five movies for Selznick; Billy Rose’s
Jumbo
(62, Charles Walters); and
Circus World
(64, Hathaway).

Tippi Hedren
(Nathalie Hedren), b. Lafayette, Minnesota, 1935
On the strength of her post-Hitchcock work—R. G. Springsteen’s
Tiger by the Tail
(68), Chaplin’s
A Countess from Hong Kong
(67), and
The Harrad Experiment
(73, Ted Post)—it would be easy to dismiss Tippi Hedren as just another pretty model who made the unnecessary and unrewarding move into films. But her first two films tell a different story, for she was discovered by Alfred Hitchcock for
The Birds
(63) and
Marnie
(64). Hitchcock (who lusted after her) drew out all the brittle insecurity in her Melanie Daniels in the first: that might simply be a performance nursed by a great director. But
Marnie
is an actress’s triumph as well as a director’s, and the way in which Tippi Hedren mutters “There … there now” when she shoots her horse is typical of the insight and pathos she brings to the sexually inhibited thief.

She appeared in the strange wild life/family picture
Roar
(81), directed by her husband Noel Marshall, and featuring their daughter, Melanie Griffith. She was briefly in
Deadly Spygames
(89, Jack M. Sell); as Melanie Griffith’s mother in
Pacific Heights
(90, John Schlesinger); and in the old Patricia Collinge role in a TV remake of
Shadow of a Doubt
(91, Karen Arthur).

She worked more in the nineties, yet rarely in decent pictures:
Through the Eyes of a Killer
(92, Peter Markle);
The Birds II: Land’s End
(94, Rick Rosenthal);
Treacherous Beauties
(94, Charles Jarrott);
Teresa’s Tattoo
(94, Julie Cypher);
Inevitable Grace
(94, Alex Canawati);
Sense, Sixth
(95, Gregg Cannizzaro);
Citizen Ruth
(96, Alexander Payne);
Mulligans!
(97, Miles Hood Swarth-out);
I Woke Up Early the Day I Died
(98, Aris Iliopulos);
Replacing Dad
(98, Joyce Chopra);
The Darklings
(99, Jeffrey Reiner);
The Storytellers
(99, James D. R. Hickox); the documentary
Life with Big Cats
(00, Deborah Rivel);
Ice Cream Sundae
(01, Desiree Nosbusch);
Julie and Jack
(03, James Nguyen);
Mob Dot Com
(03, Rick D’Elia);
I Heart Huckabee’s
(04, David O. Russell).

Van Heflin
(Emmett Evan Heflin Jr.) (1910–71), b. Walters, Oklahoma
Heflin never looked as smooth as a star, and he was not the sort of personality to contain the fantasizing pressure of mass audiences. Unlike many American movie stars, he looked recognizably American. This served him well in his best performances, interesting, unsentimental portraits of middle America: as the cop in
The Prowler
(51, Joseph Losey), an inventive study of a shallow, athletic materialist, a dissatisfied policeman who spends his time reading muscle magazines and who may be the very prowler that Evelyn Keyes first complains of. The density of Losey’s film and its view of American opportunism owes a lot to Heflin’s grasp of the character.

He was again good as the farmer in
Shane
(53, George Stevens), a blunt, honorable, not very perceptive man, as ignorant of violence as Alan Ladd is familiar with it—once more, the sense of family and of pioneering farming enterprise springs from Heflin’s rugged plainness; and as the coward in
3:10 to Yuma
(57, Delmer Daves), the nerve-shattered reverse of the farmer, harrowed by the task of taking a relaxed Glenn Ford to jail.

There were other good character studies, but what began as a very promising career petered out in the 1960s, perhaps because Heflin was a little too authentic. He was a young stage actor recommended to the movies by Katharine Hepburn:
A Woman Rebels
(36, Mark Sandrich);
The Outcasts of Poker Flat
(37, Christy Cabanne);
Santa Fe Trail
(40, Michael Curtiz);
The Feminine Touch
(41, W. S. Van Dyke);
H. M. Pulham Esq
. (41, King Vidor); drunk, and the only good thing in
Johnny Eager
(41, Mervyn Le Roy), for which he won the supporting actor Oscar;
Kid Glove Killer
(42, Fred Zinnemann);
Seven Sweethearts
(42, Frank Borzage);
Tennessee Johnson
(42, William Dieterle);
Presenting Lily Mars
(42, Norman Taurog);
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
(46, Lewis Milestone);
Green Dolphin Street
(47, Victor Saville);
Possessed
(47, Curtis Bernhardt); very good as the haunted coward in
Act of Violence
(48, Zinnemann);
Tap Roots
(48, George Marshall);
The Three Musketeers
(48, George Sidney); as the husband in
Madame Bovary
(49, Vincente Minnelli);
Weekend with Father
(51, Douglas Sirk);
My Son John
(51, Leo McCarey);
Wings of the Hawk
(53, Budd Boetticher);
Woman’s World
(54, Jean Negulesco);
Black Widow
(54, Nunnally Johnson);
Tanganyika
(54, André de Toth);
The Raid
(54, Hugo Fregonese);
Count Three and Pray
(55, George Sherman);
Battle Cry
(55, Raoul Walsh);
Patterns
(56, Fielder Cook);
Gunman’s Walk
(58, Phil Karlson);
Tempest
(57, Alberto Lattuada);
They Came to Cordura
(59, Robert Rossen);
Five Branded Women
(60, Martin Ritt);
To Be a Man
(63, Irving Lerner);
Once a Thief
(65, Ralph Nelson);
Stagecoach
(66, Gordon Douglas);
The Big Bounce
(68, Alex March); and
Airport
(70, George Seaton).