The Films of Robert Rossen

Abstract

Rossen's career-ended by his death at 57 early this year-was never, it seems to me, seen for what it was. Generally successful commercially, except for several years of blacklisting in the fifties, his work was never recognized as a unified artistic achievement-one rather strikingly parallels the growth of the art of the film itself. is a body of work reflects a consistent, yet changing and deepening, personal point of view, and one reflects, also, a willingness to grow, change and even dare in extending the technical means used to embody point of view. In both these respects, it parallels the dominant direction of the film today in going beyond the conventions of social realism have long been the touchstone for the serious American motion picture. In all of his major works Rossen was concerned with the search of a young man for something which he does not recognize as himself, his identity. He is a character of a certain natural inner force (for which charisma, despite its over-use, is still a good word), he cannot fully identify or control this energy, skill, or potential, this source of grace and power. is significant in answer to a survey conducted by Show magazine Rossen replied his favorite Shakespeare play was Macbeth. In it he said he found a dramatization of the ambiguity of the human condition man reaching for the symbols of his identity, rather than the reality, destroying yet finding himself in the tragic process. For Rossen's young men, these illusory symbols of the self are those of power, status, wealth, violence, domination, love turned inside out into violation. When he most realized their plight, these men have been Americans-rootless or dispossessed sociallywith a special elan and no way or place to fulfill it within the attractions and forces of their society. Within the society's corruption, the elan turns aggressive, perverse, destructive. Rossen's affinity for these young men most probably stems from his own personal relationship to what he felt was the corruption of his society. Real life is ugly, he told The New York Sun in 1947, but we can't make good pictures until we're ready to tell about it. He spent his career telling about it, yet managed career with a dynamic and aggressive expertness enabled him, like many of his heroes, to climb from a dispossessed social position (the East Side of New York) to a position of prominence and power in his field. His reaction to his society also took a political form, and again parallels the seeking of some of his heroes. The time of his youth-he was to testify in 1953-was a period of great cynicism, disillusionment; the system had failed .. . Looking for a new horizon, a new kind of society, something [he] could believe in and become a part of, he turned to communism. It offered, he said, every possible kind of thing to you at time which could fulfill your sense of idealism, offered the greatest possibility of anything tends toward the realization of the inner man. Later he was to face the corruption of vision, to discover that the idealism you were looking for, the fight for the ideas you want, are just not in the Communist Party. But he was to discover as well how other forces in the society -as made manifest in the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Hollywood blacklist-were to threaten, and temporarily block, the fulfillment of his career and present him with a final and difficult moral dilemma. Rossen's themes, then, rose from personal convictions and experiences. In his first depictions of them as a director, he was working within the realistic tradition established by the gangster and problem films of the thirties. The perspectives were the simplistic social and economic classifications of most liberal art; the