Playwright whose first film writing credit was as co-adaptor--with director Alfred Hitchcock--of his own play, "Blackmail" (1929), which also happened to be the first sound film produced in England. Bennett's knack for tense adventure stories fuelled such subsequent Hitchcock outings as "The 39 Steps" (1935) and "Foreign Correspondent" (1940). He also scripted the first screen version of the classic adventure yarn "King Solomon's Mines" (1937) and, in the mid-1950s, began a multi-film association with producer-director Irwin Allen (e.g. "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" 1961, "Five Weeks in a