Robert Rossen
Robert Rossen 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 the Academy Award for 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, 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 in 1964 so disillusioned him that it was his last film before his death two years later.
Biography
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; his father, Philip Rosen, was a house painter. As a youth, he attended New York University, hustled pool and fought some prizefights – the latter two providing crucial background for his two greatest films, The Hustler and Body and Soul, respectively. He changed his name from Rosen to Rossen in 1931.He started his theatrical career as a stage manager and director in stock and off-Broadway productions, mainly in the social and radical theaters that flourished in New York in the early and mid-1930s, as did John Huston, Elia Kazan and Joseph Losey. In 1932 Rossen directed John Wexley's Steel, about labor agitation, and Richard Maibaum's The Tree, about a lynching. A year later Rossen directed Birthright, in which Maibaum attacked Nazism, which had just triumphed in Germany with the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler in 1933.
In 1935, Rossen wrote and directed his first play, The Body Beautiful, a comedy about a naive burlesque dancer. Although the play closed after four performances, Warner Bros. director Mervyn LeRoy was so impressed that he signed Rossen to a personal screenwriting contract.
Marriage
In 1936, Rossen married Susan Siegal; the couple had three children: Carol, Stephen and Ellen.Work in Hollywood
For his first credit in Hollywood, in 1937 Rossen co-wrote with Abem Finkel a script based on the prosecution of crime lord Lucky Luciano and eventually titled Marked Woman. Although some of Warner Bros. management saw Rossen as an unknown quantity, the result won praise from both Jack L. Warner and the Daily Worker. Rossen's first solo script was for They Won't Forget, a fictionalized account of the lynching of Leo Frank, featuring Lana Turner in her debut performance.Dust Be My Destiny, co-written in 1939 by Rossen, is the story of a fugitive from justice who is eventually acquitted with help from an attorney and a journalist, the latter arguing that "a million boys all over the country" were in a similar plight. Warner Bros. then ordered producer Lou Edelman to cut the script, adding that "This is the story of two people – not a group. It is an individual problem – not a national one." Rossen was one of three writers on the gangster melodrama The Roaring Twenties, released in 1939. A remake of the 1932 play and film Life Begins was written in 1939 by Rossen and released in 1940 as A Child Is Born. The plot recounted the experiences of six expectant mothers, and there was little scope to modify the original.
The Sea Wolf, released in 1941, was based on Jack London's novel. Although the film had a strong cast and production, Rossen's re-draft of the script may be the greatest influence on the film. While the character of Captain Larsen remained both victim and oppressed in a capitalist hierarchy, he became a symbol of fascism. He split the novel's idealist hero into an intellectual bosun and a rebellious seaman. Warner Bros. cut many political points during production.
Blues in the Night, written by Rossen and two colleagues and released in 1941, shows a group of jazz musicians traveling in the Depression. Their informal methods represent working-class culture 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 disappointed with the sales.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Screen Writers Guild set up on December 8, 1941, the Hollywood Writers Mobilization, a body to organize writers for the war effort. Rossen served as the body's chairman until 1944 and advocated the opening of a Second Front to support West European resistance against the Nazis. His earnings were much greater than in 1937. However, his work for Hollywood Writers Mobilization and for the Communist Party forced him to abandon some partly developed film projects, including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which John Huston eventually directed in 1948.
In 1945 Rossen joined a picket line against Warner Bros, making an enemy of Jack Warner. Rossen signed a contract with an independent production company formed by Hal Wallis, who had previously been Warner Bros.' head of production. However Rossen wrote only two full scripts for this company, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers in 1946 and Desert Fury in 1947. In The Strange Love of Martha Ivers Rossen used a short story by John Patrick to introduce the main plot, which was set 15 years later and which Rossen wrote. The relationship between Rossen and Wallis broke down when Rossen received offers from other production companies.
Dick Powell had been a crooner but was making a new career as a dramatic actor. When Columbia Pictures agreed to make Johnny O'Clock for him in 1947, Powell successfully campaigned for Rossen to direct, and this became Rossen's debut in directing. As this crime melodrama proved a modest success, Roberts Productions signed Rossen to direct Abraham Polonsky's script of Body and Soul, described by Bob Thomas as "possibly the best prizefight film ever made." Rossen preferred an ending in which the hero wins a boxing match and then is killed by a gangster, but Polonsky insisted on his own ending, in which the hero escapes into obscurity before the fight. Following the success of Body and Soul, Rossen formed his own production company and signed with Columbia Pictures a contract that gave him wide autonomy over every second film that he made at the studio.
All the King's Men was based on the novel of the same name by Robert Penn Warren, which in turn was based on the career of politician Huey Long. Rossen introduced a new concept, that the defenders of the ordinary people can in turn become the new exploiters. As a requirement for his participation in the film, Rossen had to write to Columbia's Harry Cohn saying that he was no longer a Communist Party member. Cohn's critiques of the draft of Rossen's script included scrapping a framing structure that was difficult for audiences to follow and several improvements in the relationships and motivations of characters. A meeting of the Communist Party in Los Angeles severely criticized the film, and Rossen severed all relations with the Party. All the King's Men 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 the Academy Award for Best Director but lost to Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives. Rossen won the Golden Globe for Best Director and the film won the Golden Globe for Best Picture. His next film, The Brave Bulls, was directed in 1950 and released in 1951. This was Rossen's last work before the studios blacklisted him. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called this "the best film on bull-fighting yet."
Examinations by HUAC
After the end of World War II in 1945, the spread of Communism became the major concern in the United States. In 1946, the Republicans gained an overwhelming majority in the Congressional elections. and used this power to investigate Communist elements in the media. The Communist victory of China in 1949 and the start of the Korean War in 1950 reinforced the anti-communist concerns present at the time.During hearings in 1947, Jack Warner included Rossen among the many openly leftist writers whom his studio Warner Bros. had hired as the earliest and most openly anti-Nazi studio in Hollywood. Warner reportedly accused Rossen of incorporating communist propaganda in scripts and fired him as a result, though some believe he was also unhappy with the writers’ union activities.
Rossen was one of 19 "unfriendly witnesses" subpoenaed in October 1947 by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the second Red Scare but was one of eight not called to testify. In 1951, Rossen was named as a Communist by several HUAC witnesses and he appeared before HUAC for the first time in June 1951. 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. He was placed on the unofficial blacklist by the Hollywood studios, and Columbia broke its production contract with him.
In a widespread practice during HUAC investigations, the U.S. State Department refused to renew Rossen's passport. This, and his inability to find work, brought Rossen, like his friend, ex-Communist Elia Kazan, back to the committee in May 1953, where he identified 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.'
Like Elia Kazan's testimony, Rossen's HUAC admissions destroyed many lifelong friendships, along with impacting the careers of many of Rossen's colleagues. Kazan's career flourished and Rossen's career also quickly regained the productivity he had enjoyed prior to the blacklist. He produced, directed and co-wrote The Hustler, in 1961, and he was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium Academy Awards, sharing the nomination with his co-writer Sidney Carroll.