Ben Hecht Got There First
On hating the movies
“The movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century. Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them — as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.”
— Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century, 1954
I was moved to look up this largely unforgettable quote because people, including my colleague and friendly now-acquaintance (I don’t see him much at all since he moved out of New York) A.O. Scott, are talking about (and in Scott’s case, with) David Thomson about his book, dropping on Tuesday, called A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, in which Thomson delivers the message “the condition of movie has an extraordinary way of telling us we don’t matter,” which isn’t exactly Hecht’s complaint, but I’m sure you get where I’m coming from here. One way the movies have bamboozled us, Thomson tells Scott, is that they compel us to like or identify with characters like the Corleone family, who are, you know, really pretty bad people.
No seriously. He says this. It’s almost as if dramatic irony didn’t exist. Coppola intercut the baptism of Michael’s nephew with the brutal assassinations of Michael’s mob rivals in vain, because we’re too stupid to get what’s going on, which is that Michael lies about renouncing Satan while Michael’s own minions are up to the devil’s work. How one’s heart brims with admiration for Michael as we watch Joe Spinell sneer as he fires his gun through a revolving door window. “For me what the film is about is persuading men that they want to be in the gang and in the family,” Thomson says, “and they want to do the terrible things the guys do and they want to shut the women out of the room.”
All righty then, as Jim Carrey, the star of The Truman Show, another film Scott and Thomson viewed on their journey through space and time, would say. From where I’ve always sat, that’s one facet of what it’s about, and scarcely the most crucial one.
Maybe I’m just bitter. Because I myself have written two entire books addressing the question that Martin Scorsese and Jay Cocks pondered after giggling through Howard Hawks’ Scarface: “Why do we like these guys?” Those books, Made Men: The Story of ‘Goodfellas’ and The World Is Yours: The Story of ‘Scarface’ explore the lure of vicarious transgression and how those pictures satisfy it. My thesis is that even the most upstanding among us want to experience the thrill of getting away with, if not murder, then robbery, adultery, any of the deadly sins really. But of course one only gets away with it for so long. Where Goodfellas and Scarface diverge is in the comeuppance department: Henry Hill has to live the rest of his life like a “schnook” while Tony Montana (who’s played by the same guy who played Michael Corleone! Hey!) goes out in a blaze of…well, something. One can argue that he exited on his own terms, but he might have preferred an alternative. And while the third Godfather film is hardly ideal, one can see that Michael is made to pay in a rather awful way for his crimes against his own family. It’s true that there are viewers of the Godfather films and of Scarface that don’t get the message, just as there are guys who want to gloss over what happens to Tommy Simone when he shows up for his becoming a made man.
I interviewed Thomson myself back in the day, and he’s a genial fellow and a brilliant conversationalist — I trust I don’t need to also mention that he’s a spectacular writer. I thought of Thomson a lot last year, when I was preparing an audio commentary for the Vinegar Syndrome/Cinématographe editon of Karel Reisz’s The Gambler, which was scripted by Thomson’s dear friend James Toback, and was highly autobiographical in nature. I didn’t mention Thomson in the commentary, but I think it speaks very well of him that he was able to maintain such a close relationship with a guy whose behavior could be, well exasperating. (As I mention in my commentary, I’m acquainted with Toback’s charm and erudition, so I get it on some level.) Anyway, it’s the last day of a long holiday weekend. You whould watch a movie or something. Maybe one written by Ben Hecht.