Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

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.