In the summer of 1947 Hecht co-founded Norma Productions with Burt Lancaster, who named the company after his second wife, Norma Anderson. They worked out a deal with Universal-International, for whom Lancaster had already done "The Killers" and "Brute Force", both for Mark Hellinger Productions. Hecht and Lancaster's first production was "Kiss the Blood Off My Hands", a film noir based on British author Gerald Butler's best-selling novel. The movie starred Lancaster, Joan Fontaine and Robert Newton and was directed by Norman Foster, famous for the Mr. Moto crime series starring Peter Lorre, with a soundtrack by Miklós Rózsa, a noted film noir composer. "Kiss the Blood Off My Hands", a co-production through Norma Productions and Harold Hecht Productions, was released in late 1948 to moderate success. Following this, Hecht worked exclusively through Norma Productions for the next ten years.