Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,086

This is the grave of Robert Rossen.

Born in 1908 in New York, Robert Rosen grew up in the Jewish immigrant center of the Lower East Side. I am not sure why he added the extra s to his last name in 1931. I guess it made him sound less Jewish? Maybe? Anyway, he was a street kid and a good student at the same time. He got into NYU for college. But he also put himself through school at least in part as a pool hustler, which would serve him very well much later in life.

Rossen started working in the theater, getting jobs on Broadway and other theater productions as a stage manager and then as a director. He had promise. This was the era of social conscious theater and Rossen was very much a leftist, running in the same crowds as people such as John Houseman, Elia Kazan, and Orson Welles. He started directing leftist plays, including John Wexley’s Steel, in 1932, which was about steel organizing, Richard Maibaum’s 1932 play The Tree, about lynching, and Maibaum’s 1933 anti-Nazi play Birthright.

It wasn’t super surprising that Hollywood came calling, despite Rossen’s politics, which certainly were never universally popular there but were certainly accepted in the mid-30s. This happened after Rossen directed his own play, The Body Beautiful, in 1935. The play didn’t do a heck of a lot, but it was a comedy about a burlesque dancer and thus non-political, so he could have more acceptance with broader audiences. The director Mervyn LeRoy saw it and was really impressed and suggested to Rossen that he come to Hollywood. LeRoy was a Warner Brothers guy so he got Jack Warner to sign Rossen too.

Rossen spent the next decade as a screenwriter and a pretty good one. He became an A-list guy for top films. His first film was Lloyd Bacon’s Marked Woman, from 1937, a lightly fictionalized film about a woman standing up to Lucky Luciano starring Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart. It was well-received. It also sounds like a film I should find. Then came LeRoy’s They Won’t Forget, a film based on the lynching of Leo Frank that is most known for being Lana Turner’s first screen appearance, but starring Claude Rains.

Warner got uncomfortable with the politics of Lewis Seiler’s 1939 film Dust Be My Destiny. Rossen wrote the screenplay about the collective problem of the conditions of society that lead to people being forced into lives of crime and the conditions on work farms. Warner realized that this was a communist script and had Seton Miller rewrite a lot of it to be able a single man (John Garfield), not some comment on the corrupt nature of capitalism. Rossen wasn’t happy, but what could he do? Rossen was also one of the three screenwriters on Raoul Walsh’s great 1939 film The Roaring Twenties, one of the fantastic James Cagney performances of that era. He got into trouble for his politics again on the script for Michael Curtiz’s adaptation of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf, from 1941. Rossen wrote it as an allegory for fascism and Warner wasn’t having that.

When World War II began, Rossen, like most leftists advocated for the U.S. to stay out of it. That changed the moment Hitler declared war on Comrade Stalin and immediately, the top priority for every leftist was defeating the fascists. So when the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, Hollywood was very ready to step up, from right-wing studio execs to far left screenwriters. Rossen became the head of Hollywood Writers Mobilization, a screenwriters group ready to work for the war effort. He also was quite political, following Stalin’s line that the U.S. needed to open a second front in Europe much earlier than 1944.

Rossen broke with Warner, partly over his union work, which Warner hated him for, even as that WB was more open to left politics than other studios. Rossen left for an upstart production company, though that fell apart. The next stage in his career was launched by Dick Powell, who was seeking to move from pop singer to movie star. He didn’t just want Rossen to write Johnny O’Clock to serve as his vehicle, he wanted Rossen to direct it. Columbia was OK with this and so that happened and Powell became a big star. The movie did well enough that Rossen would begin to direct more frequently. First, he did Body and Soul, the legendary boxing film that Alexander Polonsky wrote and in which John Garfield starred.

Then came All the King’s Men in 1949, the sorta fictional Huey Long film adapted from Robert Penn Warren’s legendary novel, which is legit great. The film was great, it won Best Picture and Rossen was nominated for Best Director. His star was bright. Or it should have been, but here came the times. Now, at this point, Rossen was separating from the Communist Party. In fact, Columbia required this of him, but he was through anyway. He even went so far as to criticize the CP in the film. This was happening at the same moment that Congresscritters realized they could jack up their careers if they bust the evil commies in Hollywood. That included Rossen, who several informers mentioned. Rossen initially stood up and pleaded the Fifth.

Rossen ended up on the Blacklist. He couldn’t get his passport renewed. So he decided to turn and inform on his friends, right at the same time that his old buddy Elia Kazan did the same thing. Now, I always felt that the attacks on Kazan that lasted until the 90s were a bit overblown. What these guys did was bad, but the pressure was huge. I am not defending them, but I am saying that it’s easy to say what you would or wouldn’t do when it doesn’t matter.

Well, Rossen went back to directing as soon as he became a tool for HUAC. Alexander the Great, from 1956, is evidently a yawn. But in 1961, he wrote and directed The Hustler, which came from his own stories as a young pool hustler and of course is a legendary film of true greatness, with fantastic performances from both Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. Rossen got nominated for Best Director again for it. He moved on to make Lillith, in 1964. He worked with Warren Beatty. They hated each other, possibly due to Rossen being a snitch. After all, it was Beatty more than anyone who led the protest against Kazan when the latter was given a late life honorary Academy Award. After working with Beatty, Rossen said he was through directing.

Maybe that would have been and maybe it wouldn’t have, but living hard also took its toll on Rossen and he died in 1966, at the age of 57. Booze, cigarettes, all of it contributed.

Robert Rossen is buried in Westchester Hills Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other people nominated for Academy Awards for films made in 1961, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Charles Boyer, nominated for Best Actor for Fanny, is in Culver City, California. Montgomery Clift, nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Judgement at Nuremberg, is in Brooklyn. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.