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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Robert Rossen served a decade's apprenticeship as a writer before he turned director in 1947; and he scripted or co-scripted seven of his own ten films. Yet virtually all this writing was adaptation; the only exceptions were a couple of Warner Bros. gangster movies, Marked Woman (1937) and Racket Busters (1938), based on real events, and the historical epic, Alexander the Great (1956), of which the same might be said. Even the projects he did not carry through – The Treasure of Sierra Madre, Billy Budd, Robert Penn Warren's Night Rider – were also adaptations, except his last, unfinished script, Cocoa Beach, which (excepting early stage plays) would have been his first original. Yet, if inconsistent, his impulse to personal creative expression was strong and at times almost overbearing – his place in Andrew Sarris's category of ‘Strained Seriousness’ seems less surprising than some of his company there (Norman Jewison, for instance). So presumably he was able, more often than not, to find and use literary material which expressed or partly predigested what he wanted to say, as in The Hustler (1961), or else the material somehow helped him to discover this, as with Lilith (1964).
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