I know that a man who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty; they are both looking for alms from me, the rich man for the alms of my envy, the poor man for the alms of my guilt.

It's a comedy about a Broadway producer who was losing his leading lady to the seductive Hollywood film industry and will do anything to win her back. He could tear through things and he tore through life.

Film historian Richard Corliss called him "the" Hollywood screenwriter someone who "personified Hollywood itself. Of his seventy to ninety screenplays he wrote many anonymously to avoid the British boycott of his work in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Ben Hecht.