Life & Wisdom Quote by Ben Hecht

Chicago, in Hecht's hands, isn’t a city so much as a preserve: a cordoned-off ecosystem where a particular species of showman can still roam. Calling it a "journalistic Yellowstone Park" is a wicked inversion of the usual civic boast. Yellowstone protects nature from modernity; Hecht suggests Chicago protects a certain kind of unruly modernity from respectability. The metaphor flatters and condemns at once. A "haven" implies refuge, even romance. A "last herd" implies extinction, the end of an era. Hecht is mourning the disappearance of the old newsroom animal even as he puts it in quotation marks.

"Fantastic bravos" does the real work. Bravos are hired toughs, loud swords-for-pay from melodrama; "fantastic" upgrades them into myth, or maybe exposes them as theatrical. Hecht, a Chicago newspaperman turned Hollywood screenwriter, knew how violence, corruption, and civic swagger got converted into copy. His line nods to the city’s early 20th-century reputation: a rough industrial boomtown, an incubator for tabloid bravura, where reporters brawled for scoops and wrote with the adrenaline of street fights. This isn’t nostalgia for truth; it’s nostalgia for nerve.

The subtext is about journalism as performance and masculinity as a style. Chicago becomes the last place where the reporter can still be a character - brazen, cynical, ethically flexible, irresistibly alive - before the profession gets professionalized, sanitized, and absorbed by institutions that prefer "objectivity" to personality. Hecht’s joke lands because it admits complicity: he’s describing a wildlife refuge he helped stock.