Robert Rossen

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Robert Rossen (March 16, 1908 – February 18, 1966) was an American screenwriter, film director, and producer whose film career spanned almost three decades. His 1949 film All the King's Men won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, while Rossen was nominated for an Oscar as Best Director.

He won the Golden Globe for Best Director and the film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture.

In 1961, he directed The Hustler, which was nominated for nine Oscars and won two. After directing and writing for the stage in New York, Rossen moved to Hollywood in 1937.

From there, he worked as a screenwriter for Warner Bros.

until 1941, and then interrupted his career to serve until 1944 as the chairman of the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, a body to organize writers for the effort in World War II. In 1945, he joined a picket line against Warner Bros.

After making one film for Hal B. Wallis's newly formed production company, Rossen made one for Columbia Pictures, another for Wallis and most of his later films for his own companies, usually in collaboration with Columbia. Rossen was a member of the American Communist Party from 1937 to about 1947, and believed the Party was "dedicated to social causes of the sort that we as poor Jews from New York were interested in."He ended all relations with the Party in 1949.

Rossen was twice called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 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 found himself blacklisted by Hollywood studios as well as unable to renew his passport.

At his second appearance he named 57 people as current or former Communists and his blacklisting ended.

In order to repair finances he produced his next film, Mambo, in Italy in 1954.

While The Hustler in 1961 was a great success, conflicts on the set of Lilith so disillusioned him that it was his last film.

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Early life and career

Robert Rosen was born on March 16, 1908, and raised on the Lower East Side of New York City. His parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants, and Philip Rosen, his father, was a house painter. He fought at a time when he was a kid in New York University, hustled pool, and fought some prizefights - the latter two being the main characters in his two best films, The Hustler and Body and Soul respectively. In 1931, he changed his name from "Rosen" to "Rossen."

He began his acting career as a stage manager and producer in both Broadway and off-Broadway productions, mainly in the New York social and experimental theaters of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as John Huston, Elia Kazan, and Joseph Losey. Rossen in 1932 directed John Wexley's Steel about labour agitation and Richard Maibaum's The Tree about a lynching. A year later Rossen directed Birthright, a nation in which Maibaum confronted Nazism, which had just triumphed in Germany under Adolf Hitler's dictatorship in 1933.

Rossen wrote and directed his first play, The Body Beautiful, a tale about a naive burlesque dancer, in 1935. Despite the fact that the play came to an end after four performances, Warner Bros. director Mervyn LeRoy was so impressed that he committed Rossen to a personal screenwriting contract.

Rossen married Susan Siegal in 1936; the couple had three children: Carol, Stephen, and Ellen.

Rossen co-wrote with Abem Finkel a script based on the trial of crime lord Lucky Luciano and later titled Marked Woman, for his first film role in Hollywood. Although some of Warner Bros. management thought Rossen was an unknown quantity, the result earned praise from both Jack L. Warner and the Daily Worker. Lana Turner appeared in her debut role in They Won't Forget (1937), a fictionalized account of Leo Frank's lynching of Leo Frank.

Dust Be My Destiny, co-written in 1939 by Rossen, is the tale of a fugitive from justice who is eventually released with the help of an attorney and a journalist, who claims that "a million boys all over the country" are in a similar situation. Warner Bros. ordered producer Lou Edelman to cut the script, not a corporation. It's an individual issue, not a national one." Rossen was one of three writers on the gangster melodrama The Roaring Twenties, which was published in 1939. In 1939, Rossen wrote a remake of the 1932 play and film Life Begins, which was released in 1940 as A Child Is Born. The story told six expectant mothers, but there was no room to change the original.

The Sea Wolf, which was published in 1941, was based on Jack London's book. Despite the fact that the film had a solid cast and crew, Rossen's re-draft of the script may have the most influence on the film. Although Captain Larsen's character remained both victim and oppressed in a capitalist system, he became a symbol of imperialism. He turned the novel's idealist hero into an academic bosun and a rebellious seaman. During recording, Warner Bros. made several political alterations.

A group of jazz musicians traveling in the Depression, Blues in the Night, written by Rossen and two colleagues and released in 1941, shows a group of jazz players touring in the Depression. Their informal settings reflect working-class life rather than the commercialized music of the big bands. However, the New York Times' reviewer thought the soundtrack was "about all the film has to offer," and Warner was dissatisfied with the sales.

The Screen Writers Guild established on December 8, 1941, a body that would group writers for the war effort following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Rossen served as the body's chairman until 1944 and argued for the opening of a Second Front to help West European resistance against the Nazis. His earnings were much higher than those of 1937. However, his time with Hollywood Writers Mobilization and the Communist Party led him to cancel several partially developed film projects, including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was later directed in 1948 by John Huston.

Rossen was on a picket line against Warner Bros in 1945, making him an adversary of Jack Warner. Rossen has joined an independent production firm founded by Hal Wallis, who had previously been Warner Bros.'s head of development. Rossen did not write two complete scripts for this company, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers in 1946 and 1949, respectively, the Desert Fury. Martha Ivers Rossen's book The Strange Love of a Woman Ivers Rossen introduced the main plot, which was set 15 years ago and which Rossen wrote about. When Rossen received bids from other manufacturing firms, the partnership between Rossen and Wallis fell apart.

Dick Powell had been a crooner but he was starting a new one as a dramatic actor. Powell succeeded in convincing Rossen to direct him in 1947, making it his first attempt at directing. Roberts Productions hired Rossen to direct Abraham Polonsky's script of Body and Soul, which was described by Bob Thomas as "probably the best prizefight film ever made." Rossen wanted an ending in which the hero wins a boxing match and then is killed by a gangster, but Polonsky continued on his own terms, in which the hero flees into obscurity before the fight. Following the success of Body and Soul, Rossen formed his own production company and signed Columbia Pictures to a deal that gave him a lot of autonomy over every second film he made at the studio.

All the King's Men (1949) was based on Robert Penn Warren's novel of the same name, which in turn was based on Huey Long's career. Rossen introduced a new idea: in return, the defenders of the common people will in turn become the new slaves. Rossen had to write to Columbia's Harry Cohn, claiming that he was no longer a Communist Party member, as a condition for his participation in the film. Cohn's remarks on Rossen's script included removing a framing system that was impossible for viewers to follow and several changes in character's relationships and motivations. A Communist Party meeting in Los Angeles strongly condemned the film, and Rossen ended all links with the Party. All the King's Men received the Academy Award for Best Picture, Broderick Crawford received the accolade for Best Actor, and Mercedes McCambridge was named as Best Supporting Actress. Rossen had been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director, but he was disqualified for A Letter from Three Wives, which was lost to Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Rossen received a Golden Globe for Best Director, and the film was nominated for Best Picture at the Golden Globe. The Brave Bulls, his next film, was directed in 1950 and released in 1951. This was Rossen's last film before the studios blacklisted him. This "the best film on bullfighting to date," critic Bosley Crowther of the New York Times wrote.

Following the end of World War II in 1945, the danger facing the US shifted from Fascism to global totalitarian Communism. The Republicans gained a landslide in the Congressional elections in 1946. We used this ability to look into Communist elements in the media. The Communist triumph of China in 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 reignited the anti-communist tremblings that were still present at the time.

During hearings in 1947, Jack Warner introduced Rossen as one of the many explicitly leftist writers whose company Warner Bros. had recruited as the oldest and most openly anti-Nazi studio in Hollywood. (Warner Bros. had Confessions of a Nazi Spy [1939] and was chastised by Republicans for their conservative writers at the time.) According to reports, Warner accused Rossen of including communist propaganda in scripts and firing him as a result, although some believe he was dissatisfied with the writers' union activities.

During the second Red Scare, Rossen was one of 19 "unfriendly witnesses" subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), but he was not one of eight others not summoned to testify. Rossen was described as a Communist by several HUAC observers in 1951, and he appeared before HUAC for the first time in June 1951. He exercised his right under the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, earning what was described as the "augmented Fifth" in the publication. He answered affirmatively that he was not a member of the Communist Party and that he opposed the Party's goals, but when asked whether Rossen had ever been a member of the party, he declined to answer. Columbia broke the production deal with him after being put on the unofficial blacklist by the Hollywood studios, and Columbia broke its production deal with him.

Rossen's passport was refused to renew in a common occurrence during HUAC investigations. Rossen and his brother, ex-Communist Elia Kazan, were both brought back to the committee in May 1953, where he listed 57 people as Communists due to their inability to find jobs. "I don't believe, after two years of research, that any one individual should indulge himself in personal morale or pit it against what I believe today is the safety and stability of this nation." Stephen Rossen later shed light on his father's decision: the man's decision was revealed later:

Rossen's HUAC admissions shattered many lifelong relationships, as well as impacting the careers of several of Rossen's workers, as Elia Kazan's account shows. Kazan's career flourished, and Rossen's career soon regained the same vigor he had enjoyed prior to being blacklisted. In 1961, he produced, directed, and co-wrote The Hustler, and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Screenplay Based on Content from Another Medium Academy Awards, as part of his co-writer Sidney Carroll.

Rossen wrote Mambo from 1952 to 1953, trying to rebuild his finances after almost two years without work following the 1951 HUAC election. He had to produce the film in Italy, and it premiered in Italy in 1954 and 1955 in Italy and the United States. Rossen later said, "Mambo was supposed to be for fun," but he later "took it seriously, and it wasn't coming off." Critics slammed the film. Dorothea Fischer-Hornung in 2001 said that the film did more than Rossen and contemporary critics expected. By devoting herself to dance, the female lead resolves her own problems. Katherine Dunham's choreography highlights this process, while experimental cinematography expands the dance scenes.

Alexander the Great (1956) was a blockbuster, according to Rossen, but the majority of the essays chastised the film for failing to capture the audience's interest. "Understandable moments of boredom are rare," The New York Times' review stated, "an overlong but spectacular spectacle."

Rossen co-wrote, produced, and directed The Hustler in 1961. He collaborated with Sidney Carroll to adapt the book of the same name for the screen based on his own experience as a pool hustler. The Hustler was nominated for nine Academy Awards and two of them were selected. Rossen was nominated as Best Director and with Carroll for Best Adapted Screenplay, but he did not win either award. He was named Best Director by the New York Film Critics Circle and was honored with the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written Drama by Carroll. The Hustler was a huge success and is credited with sparking a revival in the popularity of pool in the United States, which had been on the decline for decades.

When Rossen started on his final film, Lilith (1964), he was still sick, and it was not well-reced in the United States. After it ended Rossen lost interest in directing, the film's star, Warren Beatty, was reportedly disinterested in the project. "It't worth the pain," the filmmaker said. I promise not to take it any more. On the screen, I have nothing to say right now. Even if I never make another photograph, I have The Hustler on my record. I'm content to let this one stand for me." However, at the time of his death, Rossen was planning Cocoa Beach, a script he created in 1962 that compares transients in a local neighborhood with nearby Cape Canaveral, which Leftist writer Brian Neve described as a "symbol of America's imperial [sic] reach."

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