Now, Here’s a Real Comeback : At 91, Charles Bennett is co-writing the remake of a movie he made with Alfred Hitchcock in 1929

“Blackmail,” a thriller directed by then-unknown filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, made history as Britain’s very first “talkie” in 1929.

Now, more than 60 years later, the film is again making history: Charles Bennett, 91, has been signed to co-write the screenplay for a remake.

The deal with 20th Century Fox makes Bennett the oldest screenwriter on assignment for a studio. It also brings Bennett’s career full circle.

In 1928, Bennett wrote the hit London play “Blackmail,” which starred Talullah Bankhead. Adapted for the screen by Hitchcock--Bennett received a co-writing credit--”Blackmail” was Bennett’s entry into motion pictures, and was followed by a half-dozen Bennett-Hitchcock projects, including “The Thirty-Nine Steps,” the original “The Man Who Knew Too Much” and “Foreign Correspondent.”

Producers Stuart Birnbaum and William Blaylock were students at USC Film School in the early ‘70s when they first saw “Blackmail,” in which a young woman (played by Anna Ondry) lies to the police after killing her would-be rapist, and is trapped in complications involving her Scotland Yard boyfriend and a blackmailer.

When Birnbaum and Blaylock were searching for movie material 20 years later, they remembered “Blackmail.”

“It seemed like the perfect film to remake,” said Birnbaum. “The premise isn’t dated at all. The moral imperative that drives the story hasn’t changed in 60 years. She thinks she can control her life, but finds she can’t--she’s in way over her head.”

Another plus: the film’s relative obscurity. “There are some classics that should never be remade. But this one is seldom seen,” said Birnbaum. “The public doesn’t have strong feelings about it.”

The producers began a search for the film’s rights, only to learn that they had reverted to the author of the original source material. “We didn’t even know that there had been a play. And we sure didn’t expect to find that its author was still around,” Birnbaum admitted.

Nor did Birnbaum and Blaylock expect to find that Bennett still had an agent--the Swanson Agency, run by the legendary H. N. (Swanie) Swanson, himself 91--the same agent he has been with since 1938.

They also learned that Bennett was living in the same Coldwater Canyon home he purchased in 1938--”Since the play was British, we figured he was living in England,” said Birnbaum--and that he’d like the producers to drop by.

Negotiations were coming to a close when Birnbaum, 41, and Blaylock, 45, visited the nonagenarian at his home, where Bennett served cocktails--accompanied by colorful anecdotes about his adventures in Hollywood.

“We were mesmerized. This man was so interesting and charming and witty--and sharp,” said Blaylock.

A screenwriter back when Hollywood emphasized stories rather than high concepts, Bennett is increasingly recognized as a leading “constructionist” of the golden era--and as one of Hitchcock’s most important collaborators.

Following “Blackmail,” Bennett wrote or co-wrote Hitchcock’s original “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934), “The Thirty-Nine Steps” (1935), “Secret Agent” and “Sabotage” (1936), “Young and Innocent” (1937), “Foreign Correspondent” (1940) and “Saboteur” (1942, for which he was uncredited).

Bennett also worked for directors as diverse as Robert Stevenson (“King Solomon’s Mines,” 1937; “Joan of Paris,” 1942--a Bennett favorite), Cecil B. DeMille (“Reap the Wild Wind,” 1941; “The Unconquered,” 1947), Jacques Tourneur (“Curse of the Demon,” 1958) and Irwin Allen (“The Lost World,” 1960; “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” 1961).

But in the late ‘60s, after receiving credit for writing or co-writing more than 50 films and dozens of American and British TV shows--in this country, they included “The Wild, Wild West” and “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”--Bennett saw his screenwriting career begin to fade. Finally, the assignments stopped.

“It was so frustrating, because in many ways I felt my writing had gotten even better. But at my age, no one wanted to hire me,” said Bennett, adding, “You know, I hate all the talk of this being a young man’s industry. I hate it!

“ Not because I’m an old man. But because I hate the notion that you must be young to be hot .”

Birnbaum is a veteran writer whose credits include comedy shows for Lily Tomlin, Chevy Chase, Redd Foxx and the recent “Tim Conway’s Funny America,” for which he was also co-executive producer. He co-wrote the 1982 Mark Harmon comedy feature film “Summer School” and other comedies.

Blaylock has been an executive at several film companies. He also produced the 1984 comedy-drama “Grandview U.S.A.,” and the upcoming “Adios,” an erotic thriller starring Nicolas Cage, Judge Reinhold and Erika Anderson.

Both men acknowledge that their association with Bennett gives them an entree into a world they knew only through film history books. Said Birnbaum: “This man is a window to the past--to that other world of cinema we hold so dear. He’s like a line between modern and early film history.”

Bennett was originally going to serve as an “unofficial consultant” on the “Blackmail” remake, which was being written by a pair of writers assigned by 20th Century Fox, where Birnbaum’s brother Roger is president of production.

“When the first-draft was turned in,”

mused Stuart Birnbaum, “Charles said, “ ‘This is marvelous, dear boy. But . . . the language!’ ”

Bennett later startled the producers by presenting them with a 43-page critique that essentially restructured the project.

Among Bennett’s suggestions: that the film’s central female character be made younger; at 29, he feels she may be too “long in the tooth” for some of today’s moviegoers. He suggested that she could be 10 years younger than the leading man. “Most men go for women younger than themselves, and the more sophisticated the type of man, the younger he usually likes his conquests,” Bennett wrote.

The critique also offered plenty of plot and structure advice--and emphasized the importance of a time element in a thriller (“something never lacking in Hitchcock films,” Bennett wrote).

“We were definitely impressed--but not just by the critique. We were also impressed by Charles,” said Susan Cartsonis, the vice president of production who is overseeing “Blackmail,” now being co-written by Bennett and Birnbaum.

“I know that ‘the boys’ helped me to get this job,” Bennett admitted. “But, I also believe I helped myself. You know, I am known as a constructionist--which is to say I can put together a well-crafted story. That is, and should be, the foundation of a movie. Once you have a story, you can add the dialogue and the gunshots or explosions or whatever have you.

“I sometimes think that Hollywood has forgotten just what a story is.”

In 1937, when Bennett was newly arrived in this country (he came at the invitation of Universal Pictures, at a time when Hollywood was scouting for foreign talent), a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance described him as “short, rugged, blond, pink-cheeked, handsome in a boyish sort of way.”

In 1949, Bennett looked every bit the distinguished British gentleman when he posed with drink in hand in his library, for an ad for Lord Calvert Whiskey, the beverage “for men of distinction.”

“I was a rather good-looking chap, wasn’t I?” asked Bennett with a smile, as he rifled through a stack of vintage photographs.

Bennett likes to chat over cocktails in the alcove bar of his Coldwater Canyon home, where he lives with his nurse “and good friend” Ruth Gross, and several pampered cats.

Purchased for $14,500 when the canyon was filled with orange groves, the Spanish style house has exposed ceiling beams, a raised wood floor and a lot of history.

According to Bennett, Bugsy Siegel once slept here, renting the house while Bennett was away in England. “And I quite liked him,” said Bennett, who wrote “an attractive gangster” role as a homage to Siegel. (The film was never made, recalled Bennett, largely because the studios balked at the ending in which the gangster kills himself.)

At Bennett’s recent 91st birthday party, the guest list included notables from Hollywood’s golden era. Among them: screenwriter Curt Siodmak (“Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman,” 1942; “Son of Dracula,” 1943), biographer Sam Marx (the former story editor to Sam Goldwyn) and British actress Anna Lee (TV’s “General Hospital” and dozens of feature films), who got her first job at 15, appearing in one of Bennett’s plays.

A man who uses first names when discussing people like Errol (Flynn, who “was every conceivable thing but a Nazi!”) and Larry (as in Olivier), Bennett evokes the romance--and civility--of another era.

Consider what happened when Bennett traveled to England for a romantic reunion with his beloved first wife, Faith Margaret, a Royal Air Force aviator, only to learn that she had fallen in love with a dashing RAF flier. “She brought him to our suite at the Savoy, and said, ‘Charles, I want a divorce.’ ” What did Bennett do? “My dear, what could I do? He was such a likable chap. . . . I ordered up champagne. We drank until 5 in the morning.” Bennett, who has a son--L.A. area schoolteacher John Bennett, 42, by his late second wife, Betty--also tells colorful, but discreet tales about some of the legendary actors and actresses he knew. (He’ll do some looking back in his autobiography--he’s already done some 400 pages--which is temporarily shelved until he wraps “Blackmail.”)

Like Bankhead, who once invited him into her dressing room for a drink--when she was stark-naked. “It wasn’t an invitation to an affair,” Bennett said. “It was just the way she was. That was Talullah.”

There are professional revelations too: Bennett once asked a young American actor at a party to attempt a British accent. (With Britain at war, British actors were getting harder to find). A then-unknown Alan Ladd complied--and wound up playing a soldier who dies in the sewers of Paris in “Joan of Paris.” The role brought Ladd to the attention of the industry’s studio chiefs. Shortly afterward, he landed his star-making role in “This Gun for Hire.”

“I probably should have taken 10%,” Bennett quipped.

And of course, there was Hitchcock--with whom he remained good friends until his death.

“But it was difficult, sometimes. He could be your best friend--or your worst enemy.” said Bennett, who says he is the one who suggested that David O. Selznick bring Hitchcock to this country.

In the recently published “Screenwriter: Words Become Pictures,” author Lee Server calls the Bennett-Hitchcock team “perhaps the most important and long-lasting collaboration of either man’s career.” Server notes that, though the two worked apart after 1940, “Bennett’s influence would be felt in many of Hitchcock’s subsequent films, as the director continually reworked elements from the earlier successes.”

As Bennett noted, “I learned a lot from him. But, curiously enough, he also learned from me. He hardly ever departed from our mutual type of thinking--even long after I was busy elsewhere and had become his friend rather than his main constructionist writer.”

Why did Bennett and Hitchcock part company professionally? “It is no great mystery. You must understand that we both became successful. I was busy--and so was he,” Bennett said simply.

(In his book, “Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age,” Pat McGilligan theorized that the two parted because Hitchcock “was terribly insecure about writers and about his own mystique . . . and never gave writers much credit where it might otherwise shine on ‘Hitch.’ ”)

Ironically, given the state of things in youth-obsessed Hollywood, Hitchcock might have trouble finding work, if he were still alive today.

As Birnbaum noted, “It’s a crime when you realize that so many good filmmakers don’t get to work, because of a feeling that they’re too old.” Notable exceptions are few, and include David Lean, Akira Kurosawa and Charles Crichton.

Blaylock says: “I’ve come to believe that life experiences are what’s important for writers. Unfortunately, a lot of young writers today are writing about what they’ve seen on TV and in the movies--rather than what they’ve lived. So you get movies with surface elements and not a lot of depth.

“Well, I think Mr. Bennett--with all of his life experiences--can out-depth any of us.”