May 7, 1953 – Two years after refusing to reveal the Communist associations of friends and acquaintances, the Oscar-winning, blacklisted writer-director-producer Robert Rossen made a dramatic about-face before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). His appearance highlighted the dilemmas of Hollywood’s creative talent during the cold war period of the “Great Fear,” while also mirroring the ethical quandaries of Rossen’s best films.
Film fans are likely familiar with the phrase “The Hollywood Ten,” the group of writer-directors who defied HUAC subpoenas in 1947. Part of the reason for that list—containing a nice, round, even number, it should be noted—was that the committee’s media-savvy investigators had whittled it down from a larger list of “The Hollywood Nineteen” or “The Unfriendly Nineteen,” with the ones in the smaller group picked to appear immediately because they had not served in the armed forces during WWII and could therefore look like a “Fifth Column” of Soviet sympathizers. Rossen was among the original 19. (Billy Wilder had this characteristic quip about the “Hollywood Ten”: “Two had talent, and the rest were just unfriendly."
Rossen’s pre-HUAC films reflected his personal background as well as the intense class consciousness that arose from his then-fervent Communism. His 1937 script for They Won’t Forget was a fictionalized version of the notorious Leo Frank lynching in the South. Though he did not write the screenplay for the 1947 John Garfield movie Body and Soul, the boxing milieu was one he knew intimately as a young pugilist in New York City. Other notable films of his during that period – A Walk in the Sun, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, and Johnny O’Clock –preceded his career-topping triumph, the adaptation of All the King’s Men that netted him a Best Picture Oscar.
Two of these films, Body and Soul and All the King’s Men, feature protagonists led, by their fierce drive and ambition, to an ethical crossroads. John Garfield’s pugilist in the former must decide whether to go along with the corrupt byways of the boxing profession; Broderick Crawford’s Willy Stark, a Huey Long stand-in, decides that cheating is the best way to win election as governor if it means he’ll be able to accomplish the reforms they want.
Both men make Faustian bargains in pursuit of their goals. Now Rossen was tempted to do the same.
Witnesses before HUAC faced a Catch-22. Refusing to testify on First Amendment grounds was not allowed by the courts and would only open them up to indictments. Taking the Fifth Amendment was legally permissible but would immediately lead to suspension by the studios.
And then there was informing, a smelly business all around. Even if you no longer believed in the Communist Party – and Rossen appears to have left it sometime between the end of the war and 1949—informing meant testifying against longtime friends.
After two years of refusing to name names, Rossen – by now, living in Mexico – could no longer find work. His health was in serious disrepair because of diabetes and worsening drinking. He needed a job. He was ready to do what had to be done.
Nevertheless, his testimony in 1953 was shot through with unease, including his answer to a question about whether he would be regarded as a stool pigeon: “I think that is a rather romantic--that is like children playing at cops and robbers. They are just kidding themselves, and I don't care what the characterizations in terms of--people can take whatever positions they want.”
After his testimony, Rossen was able to find work again. After some indifferent films in the rest of the 1960s, he rebounded with the Paul Newman film The Hustler (1961), for which he was nominated for another Oscar, and the Warren Beatty movie Lilith (1964). But none of these post-HUAC films evinced the social consciousness of his earlier films.
Though he had continued to make films, Rossen stayed away from Hollywood after that. I’m not sure why – disgust at the suits that had forced him to testify? Unwillingness to show his face around friends he’d betrayed? Both? Whatever the case, the health difficulties that had led to his 180-degree turn before HUAC eventually led to his death, at age 57, in 1966.
Two full-length accounts of the blacklist period and that of the era preceding it, Nancy Lynn Schwartz’s The Hollywood Writers' Wars and Victor S. Navasky’s Naming Names, are diminished somewhat in value because of their simplistic depiction of the blacklist victims as unblemished heroes. In a way, it reflects the black-and-white viewpoints that divided so many back then.
It is equally as true that the Communist Party in Hollywood (including Rossen) crushed internal dissent and performed unseemly ideological somersaults to reflect the Soviet line as that HUAC flagrantly abused witnesses’ constitutional rights to freedom of speech and association. Yet you’d never know it from several years ago, when much of today’s Hollywood sat in their chairs, without applauding, when director (and, like Rossen, informer) Elia Kazan was awarded a special Oscar for lifetime achievement. Unfortunately, it reflected what has become painfully true in recent years: Hollywood has become better at moral posturing than at making movies.
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