Robert Rossen

Robert Rossen (born March 16, 1908, New York, New York, U.S.—died February 18, 1966, New York City) was an American writer and director whose career—although highlighted by a number of notable films, especially All the King’s Men (1949) and The Hustler (1961)—was damaged after he was blacklisted for initially refusing to testify (1951) before the House Un-American Activities Committee about alleged communist involvement.

The 1940s and early ’50s

Rossen directed and stage-managed in the theatre for several years before breaking into Hollywood as a screenwriter in 1936. He quickly set up shop at Warner Brothers, where he wrote (or cowrote) some of the studio’s best films of the 1930s, including Marked Woman (1937), They Won’t Forget (1937), Dust Be My Destiny (1939), and The Roaring Twenties (1939). Rossen worked on the screenplays for The Sea Wolf (1941), Out of the Fog (1941), and Edge of Darkness (1943) before leaving the studio to write the World War II classic A Walk in the Sun (1945). He later penned The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), which became a noteworthy example of film noir, and he contributed (uncredited) to the screenplay of John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948).

Rossen’s first two directorial efforts were the competent film noir Johnny O’Clock, which he also wrote, and the boxing classic Body and Soul (both 1947). The latter movie featured John Garfield in arguably his finest performance, for which he received his only Academy Award nomination. In addition, James Wong Howe’s trailblazing cinematography and a potent script by Abraham Polonsky provided Rossen with unusually strong support. Rossen ascended to the top rank of Hollywood directors with All the King’s Men (1949), which he also produced and scripted, adapting the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren. It was an enormous critical and commercial success, winning Academy Awards for best picture, best actor (Broderick Crawford), and best supporting actress (Mercedes McCambridge); Rossen was nominated for best direction and best screenplay (losing on both counts to Joseph Mankiewicz). The Brave Bulls (1951) was Rossen’s peculiar choice to follow such a triumph. Shot in Mexico, its story about a matador had limited commercial appeal, particularly with the no-star cast that Rossen (who also produced) assembled.

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Rossen had little time to concern himself with that film’s prospects, however. In 1951 he was called before a session of the House Un-American Activities Committee after others had testified that he had been a member of the Communist Party. Although he had joined the party in the 1930s, Rossen had broken with it about 1947. At his appearance, Rossen exercised his Fifth Amendment rights, whereupon he was blacklisted. However, during a special closed session in 1953, he recanted and named names. He was subsequently removed from the blacklist.

After the blacklist

Although free to work again, Rossen struggled to revive his career; his initial post-blacklist films were largely unsuccessful. In 1954 he made the melodrama Mambo, which was shot in Venice and starred Shelley Winters, Vittorio Gassman, and Silvana Mangano. Alexander the Great (1956), with a blond Richard Burton, was a handsomely mounted account of Alexander’s remarkable conquests, but Island in the Sun (1957) marked the first time in many years that Rossen neither produced nor scripted one of his own films, and it suffered from his absence. The 1959 historical drama They Came to Cordura set Gary Cooper and Rita Hayworth during the days of Pancho Villa in Mexico; although a solid production, it was a disappointment at the box office.

Based on his initial post-blacklist work, it appeared that Rossen would never regain his former stature, but he did—in 1961, when The Hustler was released. Based on Walter Tevis’s novel about pool hustlers, the film was produced and cowritten (with Sidney Carroll) by Rossen, and it earned him his first Academy Award nomination for directing since 1949. One of the year’s best films, it contains what may be the finest work of Paul Newman’s career (superior even to his Oscar-winning performance in Martin Scorsese’s 1986 sequel, The Color of Money).

The success of The Hustler might have signaled the start of a whole new career for Rossen, one in which he could again work regularly in Hollywood, but he made only one more movie, Lilith (1964), shot in England. It was a mixed success. Warren Beatty played a therapist-in-training at a Maryland asylum who falls in love with a mentally ill patient (Jean Seberg), only to lose his own hold on reality. Although the film did poorly at the box office, it was a work to take seriously and indicated that Rossen had more to give. However, after struggling with various illnesses, he died in 1966.

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