Robert Rossen’s Last Interview

The following conversation is an excerpt from the full interview, featured in the revised edition of Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism. Edited by Joseph McBride, the book was first published in 1968 in a limited edition by the Wisconsin Film Society Press, and is now republished by Sticking Place Books. This text appears with permission of the book’s editor, who wrote the following introduction to the interview, and in conjunction with the spring edition of our New Book Releases.

This interview was conducted in Robert Rossen’s New York apartment on December 23, 1965. He died on February 18, 1966, at the age of 57. A hard-nosed and individualistic writer-director, Rossen began as a New York playwright and stage director. He entered movies as a Hollywood screenwriter in 1936, working on such films as They Won’t Forget, The Roaring Twenties, and A Walk in the Sun. He later recalled that he was a member of the Communist Party “from about 1937 to 1947.” After his directorial debut in 1947, Rossen made such critically acclaimed films as Body and Soul (written by Abraham Polonsky, who was later blacklisted) and All the King’s Men.

Rossen was one of the Hollywood Nineteen who were subpoenaed to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947, but he was one of eight who were not called. He was blacklisted and moved to Mexico after disavowing Communism but refusing to name names and taking the Fifth Amendment when called to testify before HUAC in 1951. In 1953, however, Rossen restored his career by acting as a friendly witness before HUAC, naming sixty people as Communist Party members. He told the committee, ”I don’t think, after two years of thinking, that any one individual can even indulge himself in the luxury of individual morality or pit it against what I feel today very strongly is the security and safety of this nation.” Polonsky was not one of those named to HUAC by Rossen but said of his former colleague in 1997, “You wouldn’t want to be on a desert island with Rossen, because if the two of you didn’t have any food, he might want to have you for lunch tomorrow.”

Rossen eventually returned to prominence in the film industry; his last two films, The Hustler (1961) and Lilith (1964), are among his most highly regarded, but it took his death to make American critics look closely at his last film, after it opened to a more positive response in Europe. Rossen’s son, Stephen, speaking to Victor S. Navasky for his 1980 book, Naming Names, said about his father’s informing, “It ate away at him. I think it had a physical effect on him. It made him sick. He was one of those guys who took things internally.”

Daniel Stein: The new movie that came out, The Cincinnati Kid, has been called a bad Hustler, but I think that Lilith was called… one critic called it a poor David and Lisa. I don’t think that it is compared often …

Robert Rossen: What kind of critic was it?

It was a critic for a film magazine.

A man or woman?

I don’t remember. I think it was a man.

The only thing I could tell you—I don’t think whoever it is knows what they’re talking about. First of all, I never saw David and Lisa, very deliberately. I didn’t want anything to be like it. See? And secondly, the theme… I knew enough about it, and the theme of David and Lisa is completely antithetical to the theme of Lilith. Like David and Lisa, it seems to me, is a very—I understand it’s very well-made and all that, but it’s a very small story and has no implications outside of its immediate story, of any size. Lilith I thought had a tremendous amount of implications. I don’t think… I think the critics were shocked by Lilith.

Why?

Shocked because I made it, for reason number one.

Why?

Because you never expected me to make that kind of picture. They’d associated me with everything else—

With the tough type of The Hustler?

That’s right, and I think I knocked them right out on their ass, because critics like to stay, once they set you up in their mind—they may have created the image, they don’t want you to destroy that image for them, because they’re very comfortable and it’s safe and sane for them to—how shall I put it—for you to stay in that image. They don’t have to start saying, now why did he make this picture? What made him change? Why did he do it? This makes them work, and critics don’t work.

But actually it was a change more in style than in content.

Yeah, in style. [To Mrs. Rossen] Danny was telling me something about Berkeley, he was out there, he saw Lilith, which we’re talking about now. He said when the line came on about reality, you know, that psycho, and the kid said, “What’s so wonderful about reality?” all those… they were graduate students, weren’t they?

Mostly graduate students.

They all got up and applauded. They all applauded.

I went to see it in San Francisco and in Wisconsin and nothing happened, but when I went to see it just two weeks ago they applauded that line.—What I was saying was that although the style was different in Lilith the content wasn’t really, and that’s what I think the critics missed. My question is, why do you think that they missed this? They didn’t really examine the social aspects of Lilith at all.

They didn’t all miss it. There were critics who liked it very much. I got a copy of a French paper, Combat. Liked it very much and understood the picture. The first review, wasn’t it Good Housekeeping or something? It was a fantastic reviewer. I really feel that critics don’t like for you— not only me, I’m not talking personally—they don’t like you to go out of the image they have created for you. I don’t think they got all the.… for instance, I don’t think a lot of the critics got The Hustler, the American critics. I think the European critics did. I don’t think the American critics… I don’t think Archer Winsten [of the New York Post] still knows what that picture’s about.

Do you think the American critics now are poor?

Yeah. Very poor. Again, I think everybody’s playing a game—they’re wearing masks. They’ve created a certain style for themselves, they live up to the style. I think they are doing things for each other. It’s like the in-group in literature, you know, they’re writing to please each other. And I don’t think they do any real work; it’s too easy—they’re established. It’s the establishment.

But was Lilith a financial success?

No.

It wasn’t—and you would attribute this primarily…

No, no, no. I had this settled—I think Lilith released today would do better financially than when released two or three years ago, whenever it was released.

Why do you say that?

Because I think that advances in films go very quickly. In other words, I think audiences catch on more. Two or three films behind you on any kind of a subject, you are better off, you see, if you’ve got a good film. For instance I think in Alexander [the Great], if Alexander had been released three years after it was released, still being the same picture, it would do a better business than it did then because you would already have had a kind of an audience being in tune to historical films, which they weren’t at that time.

Do you think part of that problem was that the audiences and the critics were tuned in to films like David and Lisa…

Yes.

… and that this film came right on its heels, so that they—

Oh sure. I also think it was… I didn’t see David and Lisa so I don’t know—

The same subject—

Same subject, but I think Lilith is probably a more complex picture.

I think that it’s much, much better.

Well, I found they could accept David and Lisa.

But they were looking for the same thing in Lilith.

They were, yes, well, maybe it didn’t come off. I thought it came off. There is one thing that I think I missed. I shot it but I cut it out. See, I think there was too far a separation, in terms of an audience, from the world that she had left to the world that she had gotten into, you see.

Yes.

Now, I had a couple of scenes in it, for instance, I had an elderly couple come to pick up their daughter or to visit their daughter on a Sunday. And her comments were so shrewd, and so sharp, you know… and the hurried kiss when they’d go, you know that? Here and there, almost unobtrusively, to show the outside world. And I had a great handicap working. I didn’t know it but it finally almost killed me, of this sickness. I just made a terrible mistake in casting.

[Warren] Beatty?

Yeah, he was just horrible, just horrible. Whatever chance you had of communication, there was only one chance you really had, a really big chance of communication that you had, and that was to make the audience become Beatty. A young guy who wants to do something good, who has all kinds of decent instincts, walks in there, totally healthy, totally well, and as he gets into this world, he too begins to have doubts, and he too on the basis of his own experience begins to get entangled. See, he never gave you the feeling of entanglement because right from the beginning, he belonged in that institution. He was psychotic.

Yes, but part of that—now I understood this in the film—but part of what drew me away were the slight innuendos that he was already sick from the beginning.

That’s his own.

Yes, but it was in the script too…

I don’t care.

… with his mother.

Oh, yeah, but that was in—yes, that was in the book too. But again, even with that—I took an awful lot of it out— but even with that, granted that, the point is if you had gotten the feeling that, well, this guy was an American boy who had gone through a war experience, came back, didn’t want to take the old crappy jobs they had around, but was a guy who really meant what he said when he said, “I want to do something for people”—but you never believed him for a moment. There was nothing I could do, and I had terrible fights with him, and you know, a lot of the stuff I had was all through him. But you see, it was bad casting and there was nothing you could do about it, because he’s so sick that he brings his sickness in any role that he does. In other words, the picture, instead of going in that direction, always goes like within his nexus. The picture becomes something else, and if he’s got a leading role, you can’t lick it. Because he don’t believe it. He wouldn’t want to help anyone. The man himself!

I don’t know, but in spite of that I saw it as the story of a “normal guy.”

You saw it because—you are bringing things to it. Look at it from an audience point of view… you take an average audience. They wanted to go with this picture. For instance, in New York this picture did very well. It really did very well, but they couldn’t go with it outside because they couldn’t find a means of identification. Now I played her [Jean Seberg] for a Midwestern, you know, drugstore owner’s daughter, which is her own life. She was good… reality to her meant—what did it mean? Nothing. She was right. You had a feeling of conviction. But I have no feeling for him. And, no, I don’t want to, you know…

Yes.

I like the picture. I think what it had to say is an important comment to make in today’s society. I think it hasn’t even been touched yet. This whole question of inner life.… I think there’s only one man that I know of in films that really and truly understands how to do it. And comes close, and that’s Bergman. I think Fellini’s a fake, totally and completely, a depraved—not depraved, that’s the wrong word—an Italian vaudevillian. I think to even compare Fellini and Bergman… I am perfectly willing to compare De Sica, not that they do the same things, but in terms of real honest intent. Or some of the younger Italians…

I’ve heard you compared with De Sica.

Yeah. Yeah. No, but I’ve been trying to say that Fellini to me… I saw this last picture [Juliet of the Spirits], and I was sick, and I went in the afternoon, that’s the only time I can see a picture—I walked out after an hour. I was insulted. I really was insulted. I was insulted at the choice of material, I was insulted at the fact that he gave me these experiences, traumatic experiences, which would make or not make her life… he did the same thing in 8½!

Yes.

Big traumatic experience, a guy wants to screw a crazy witch, who hasn’t wanted to screw a crazy witch? Used to live in the streets, what the hell is her name—“Crazy Mary” we used to call her. She’d come around singing about “hanging the Kaiser,” you know, and the big thing was, the young kids, they didn’t care who they got back in the back alley, they’d throw her on a bed… Big traumatic thing, and this guy passes it off as—even in Dolce Vita when you think of those sequences with the intellectuals, and the guy who kills the girl, the young daughter, wasn’t it?

Yes.

And the whole business about—I mean this guy’s a fool, he’s an idiot. I don’t want to see his pictures.

I liked some of his early ones. La Strada.

Strada… I will tell you what I liked even more, I liked Vitelloni. I liked Vitelloni. Vitelloni seemed realer. But yes, he’s a good man but he has no… I’m not making brains a prerequisite, I’m making intent the prerequisite. Brains, what the hell, I know a lot of brainy guys can’t make a picture around the corner. See? But I think—but Bergman does things that are trying to really get into twentieth century… the whole approach to that part of life which is subjective and yet has to be objective because we have no other defense.

What do you think of the films of Antonioni and the films of Sidney Lumet, the American director?

Antonioni, I like a few. I think he begins to imitate himself. I liked L’Avventura very much; I liked parts of La Notte, especially the last part of it. I can’t say I think very much of the rest of his films. Lumet I think lacks a thing that will stop him from—he’ll always do good pictures, he’ll never do a great one. He lacks spontaneity. Everything’s too laid out. The television really got him over the years.

Yes.

Absolutely lacks it. It’s too well-planned. He likes the taking advantage. That’s why he likes to work in studios. See, anybody who likes to work in studios likes to work in them because you cannot improvise, it’s very hard to improvise except within a given scene. You go on a location, or on a real set, and everything around you leads you into another idea. You can go down looking for that and find that. And you gotta have the guts and the spontaneous quality of getting that right away.

I understand you shot a lot of All the King’s Men spontaneously, that you took people, real people, and that you shot in actual hotel rooms.

Oh yes, I only had one set in the whole picture, that’s all.

Really?

One set.

That I didn’t know.

The set in the governor’s mansion, that’s the only set…

You did the same thing in The Brave Bulls, didn’t you?

Totally. Totally. The Brave Bulls was all shot on location. I think again there were maybe one or two sets in the picture. I discovered the idea of “skills” in the first picture I did, of not using actors when the predominant quality in what they’re doing is a skill. I did a picture called Johnny O’Clock.

Your first one.

And the guys who were backing the picture were gamblers, you know, gamblers, gunmen. And when it came down to shooting the game room scenes, it was very funny. They insisted on bringing their own equipment in, their mother-of-pearl chips and the whole business. Their own dealers. And, as they put it, it’s gotta be effective because they were well-known, well-known in Havana, New York, you know. So I said “fine,” bring the guys in, they’ll show the actors what to do. And I got in there and I watched these guys—they were amazing. Nobody could riffle a deck or could make a call or could watch a customer like these guys. So I then said, what am I fooling around with actors for? And I stayed with that group in that picture. Well, then when it came to Body and Soul, I knew a lot about fighting, I knew a lot of guys down in Los Angeles hanging around gyms, there were Seffarina, Garcia and that whole crowd. And [cinematographer] Jimmie [James Wong] Howe, Jimmie, you know he used to be [a bantamweight professional boxer]. And he knew a lot of these guys, he knew a lot about fighting, so we decided the whole mishmash, you know, there’d be absolutely no actors in those scenes. And that’s the way we shot it. And for years in Hollywood they used to be saying, “How do you get newsreel photography; how do you get it?” Well, we came up with an answer that was so simple it was really… you shoot it like a newsreel man. You use the same lights. This was early stuff; today it’s taken for granted. You never use any lights, you don’t have any fillers, you use the ring light. You have six Eyemo cameramen and you put newspaper names on their hats, so they shoot right into each other’s lenses. You get every conceivable angle you want, which you see in the newsreels, and you get that grainy, wonderful quality. Now today—everybody does it. That was a big revolution.