Robert Rossen (March 16, 1908 – February 18, 1966) was an American screenwriter, film director, and producer. Initially writing and directing for the stage, Rossen moved to Hollywood in 1937. His film career spanned almost three decades. Rossen was twice nominated for an Academy Award for best director and once for best adapted screenplay, winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Director for All the King’s Men (1949).Rossen was twice called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, in 1951 and in 1953. He exercised his Fifth Amendment rights at his first appearance, refusing to state whether he had ever been a Communist. As a result he was unofficially blacklisted by the Hollywood studio bosses. At his second appearance he named 57 people as current or former Communists and was removed from the unofficial blacklist. He returned to filmmaking, although his last film so disillusioned him that he did not work for the last three years of his life.
Early life and career
Rossen was born and raised on the lower East side of New York City, the son of a rabbi. In his youth he hustled pool and did some prizefighting. Rossen began his career on Broadway as a playwright and a stage manager. Rossen directed two plays in 1932, Steel by John Wexley and The Tree, an anti-lynching play by Richard Maibaum and directed Maibaum’s Birthright, an anti-Nazi drama, in 1933. He wrote and directed The Body Beautiful, a comedy about a naive burlesque dancer, in 1935. The play ran just four performances but Warner Bros. director Mervyn LeRoy was so impressed by it that he signed Rossen to a personal screenwriting contract. Rossen came to Hollywood in 1937. His first solo script was for They Won’t Forget (1937), a fictionalized account of the Leo Frank case featuring Lana Turner in her debut performance.
After ten years with Warner Bros. Rossen moved to Columbia Pictures. He wanted to direct, and was given his opportunity with the 1947 film Johnny O’Clock. He followed this the same year with Body and Soul, described by Hollywood reporter Bob Thomas as “possibly the best prizefight film ever made.” His next film was All the King’s Men (1949), described as Rossen’s “triumph and very likely his corruption”. The film, based on the novel of the same name by Robert Penn Warren, won the Academy Award for Best Picture; Broderick Crawford won the award for Best Actor and Mercedes McCambridge was honored as Best Supporting Actress. Rossen was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director but lost to Joseph L. Mankiewicz and A Letter to Three Wives. He won a Golden Globe for Best Director and the film won the award for Best Picture.
Communism
Rossen joined the American Communist Party in 1937 and left the party in 1947. He joined, he would later tell his son Stephen, because he believed the party was “dedicated to social causes of the sort that we as poor Jews from New York were interested in.”Rossen was one of 19 “unfriendly witnesses” subpoenaed in October 1947 by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the second Red Scare but was one of eight not called to testify. Rossen in 1948 sent a letter to Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn advising Cohn that he was not at that time a Communist. In 1951, however, Rossen was named as a Communist by several HUAC witnesses and he appeared before HUAC for the first time in June of that year. He exercised his rights under the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, taking what came to be known as the “augmented Fifth”. He testified that he was not a member of the Communist Party and that he disagreed with the aims of the party but when asked to state whether he had ever been a member of the party Rossen refused to answer. Rossen was placed on the unofficial blacklist by the Hollywood studios and he did not work for the next two years. In May 1953, Rossen again appeared before the committee and named 57 people as Communists. He explained to the committee why he chose to testify: “I don’t think, after two years of thinking, that any one individual can indulge himself in the luxury of personal morality or pit it against what I feel today very strongly is the security and safety of this nation.” Stephen Rossen later shed light on his father’s decision:
“It killed him not to work. He was torn between his desire to work and his desire not to talk, and he didn’t know what to do. What I think he wanted to know was, what would I think of him if he talked? He didn’t say it in that way, though. Then he explained to me the politics of it—how the studios were in on it, and there was never any chance of his working. He was under pressure, he was sick, his diabetes was bad, and he was drinking. By this time I understood that he had refused to talk before and had done his time, from my point of view. What could any kid say at that point? You say, ‘I love you and I’m behind you.’”
Return to filmmaking
HTML clipboardHaving testified before HUAC and having been removed from the unofficial blacklist, Rossen returned to producing and directing with Mambo (1954), followed by Alexander the Great (1956). In 1961, Rossen co-wrote, produced and directed The Hustler. Drawing upon his own experiences as a pool hustler, Rossen teamed with Sidney Carroll to adapt the novel of the same name for the screen. The Hustler was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won two. Rossen was nominated as Best Director and with Carroll for Best Adapted Screenplay but did not win either award. He was named Best Director by the New York Film Critics Circle and shared with Carroll the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written Drama.The Hustler was an enormous popular success and is credited with sparking a resurgence in the popularity of pool in the United States, which had been on the decline for decades.
Following his final film, Lilith (1964), Rossen lost interest in directing, reportedly because of conflicts with Lilith star Warren Beatty. “It isn’t worth that kind of grief. I won’t take it any more. I have nothing to say on the screen right now. Even if I never make another picture, I’ve got The Hustler on my record. I’m content to let that one stand for me.”
Robert Rossen died at age 57 following a series of illnesses and is interred at Westchester Hills Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. He was survived by his wife Sue, daughters Carol and Ellen and son Stephen.
Reception
Rossen was one of the directors who developed film gris (French for “grey film”). In his films for Warner Brothers’ “Popular Front” period between 1937 and 1944, consistent themes were the conditions of working people, the portrayal of gangsters and racketeers, and opposition to fascism. After Dust Be My Destiny, written by Rossen and released in 1939, Frank Nugent, who regularly reviewed for The New York Times, complained about Warner Brothers’ long line of melodramas about boys from poor neighbourhoods. Unlike filmmakers such as John Ford and Howard Hawks, Rossen was willing to explain his aims as a director: “The element common to many of my films is the desire for success, ambition, which is an important element in American life. It is an important element, and has become increasingly more important in what is known as Western Civilization.” Polonsky commented that “Rossen’s talent is force applied everywhere without let-up.” Neve acknowledged that social concerns were central in most of Rossen’s works, but commented that Lilith was different from Rossen’s earlier films as it emphasized mood rather than narrative and examined through pictures and silences the nature of maladjustment and madness.
Farber noted the strong female characters of the 1930s and 1940s, and laments their replacing by all-male relationships from the 1950s onwards. For the earlier pattern Farber cited Rossen’s 1946 script The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, which was over melodramatic but portrayed a woman consumed by power, money and success. Lilith created one of the few strong women in the 1960s. Rossen generally destroyed the main character.
All Rossen’s playscripts were adaptions except Marked Woman, Racket Buster and Alexander the Great, which were based on real events. Before he was blacklisted in 1951, only two of Rossen’s adaptions were of serious novels, and Rossen’s early drafts of the script for All the King’s Men received serious criticisms within Columbia.
While head of production at Warner, Hal Wallis considered that some of his best films – including The Roaring Twenties, Marked Woman and The Sea Wolf – were written by Rossen. Wallis was very pleased with Rossen’s script in 1946 for The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, which was produced by Wallis own company. However, Rossen turned down Wallis’s next two films. Both Wallis as producer and Rossen as writer-director wanted to operate as independents, rather than under the control of a studio.
All the King’s Men was one of the last of the social “message” films, as they were eclipsed as America turned conservative. Thomas Schatz’ regarded All the King’s Men as possibly the best of the genre, as it examined alcoholism, adultery, political corruption and the influence of journalism. In 2001 the United States National Film Registry preserved the film as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Rossen produced, directed and co-wrote The Hustler in 1961. At the time Variety praised the cast, complained about the “sordid aspects” of the story and felt the film was far too long. The New Republic praised the cast and Rossen’s “sure, economical” direction, but thought the script “strains hard to give an air of menace and criminality.” The film won two Academy Awards and was nominated for another seven, was nominated in four of the Golden Globes’ categories, and gained many other awards and nominations. In 1997 the National Film Registry preserved The Hustler as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” In 2002 Roger Ebert described the film as one “where scenes have such psychic weight that they grow in our memories” and praised Rossen’s decision to develop all four main characters, and James Berardinelli listed the film in his All Time Top 100 for similar reasons. Ebert also praised Rossen’s decision to shoot the film in the “stygian gloom of the billiard parlor” created by black-and-white. Other accolades appeared in the 2000s.
In 1966 Stephen Farber used “Gothic” to described Lilith and a few other American films of the early 1960s based on psychological horror, and regarded Lilith’s female protagonist as a demonic temptress. Nina Leibman regarded Lilith as the most extreme of the American film industry’s applications, or rather misapplications, of psychoanalytic concepts, as the patient is already psychotic and has a track record of previous conquests. In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film David Thomson describes Lilith as “an oddity, the only one of [Rossen’s] films that seems passionate, mysterious and truly personal. The other films will look increasingly dated and self-contained, but Lilith may grow.” —Wikipedia
