Robert Rossen – in Flight by Richard Combs
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Robert Rossen – in flight by Richard Combs The purity of the meeting point of themes and forms excludes the possibility of a happy chance; everything leads one to believe that, after Lilith, Rossen, withdrawn from the world, waited for the same terrible gentleness that he had tamed to carry him off silently. He worked no longer, and practiced, he said, a tête‐à‐tête with the sun; this nonchalance finally won, after what detours, heightens the pathos of the last shot of Lilith, of the last shot of Rossen’s work. Vincent Bruce [Warren Beatty] advances toward the camera, ravaged, destroyed, broken, to murmur facing the audience the two syllables of despair: “Help me…”. This cry of distress definitively closes the work on the bankruptcy of illusion: the threshold is reached where the cinema confesses and goes beyond its original sin. Beyond this confession reigns silence. (Jean‐André Fieschi, Cahiers du cinéma, April 1966) In the credit sequence of Lilith (1964), a butterfly struggles to escape from a proliferating spider’s web of graphic lines and bars. To take this as an apt image for the career of Robert Rossen goes beyond the arguments of auteurism and lands in a dangerously precious realm of artistic transformations. Exactly what is called for here, however, is a theory of transformations, something that goes beyond the arguments of what is called the auteur theory. Lilith is a satisfying, not to say sublime, end to that career, one that develops so perfectly yet inexplicably from 1 what had gone before that it turns everything around – or leaves suspended in the air what the dramatist in an earlier Rossen would have embodied in clear‐cut terms. The very first shot of the film is its first act of dispossession: Vincent Bruce (Warren Beatty), fresh out of the army, arriving at the Poplar Lodge asylum to offer his services as a counselor (“I wanted to find a job where I could be a direct help to people”). Yet the shot – Vincent, a solitary figure, seen from behind, walking down a tree‐lined avenue in a hushed country landscape – already hints at dispossession. For a simple exterior, it has a peculiar interior quality, a sense of abandonment and foreboding on which the film, even more peculiarly, will play a series of variations rather than explain in narrative terms. Vincent could be fitted well enough into the context of Rossen’s other films, as they have been examined and explained elsewhere: “The protagonists in Robert Rossen’s films are blind people struggling for sight” (Cinema); “In all of his major works, Rossen was concerned with the search of a young man for something he does not recognise as himself, his identity” (Film Quarterly). But if Lilith is, stylistically, a series of dispossessions – the ghostly quality, the casting adrift of that first shot; the confusion of points of view thereafter – then it follows that Vincent will become less substantial, not more, in his search for sight or self; will himself become a playground for ghosts. Thematically, Lilith could be a haunting, a tale of possession, with blonde Lilith (Jean Seberg) the negative vampire of desire, a force of sexual enslavement unleashing destructive demons in her victims: Vincent half‐wills another patient (Peter Fonda), his romantic rival, to commit suicide. Of course, the film that bears her name is not essentially about Lilith, it is another of Rossen’s male tragedies; she is a force that is everywhere and nowhere, pre‐creation (like the Lilith who was Adam’s troublesome mate before Eve). She is the negative undertow in Vincent – drawing him back to the mother who was herself insane, leading him in a circle that is completed when the hero who has offered his services as a counselor finally presents himself as a patient. Which, of course, is really why he came to Poplar Lodge in the first place (“I’ve lived here all my life and I was always kind of curious about this place”). Vincent the possessed gives us Rossen the dispossessed: the director who had always been associated with clear, argumentative, not to say didactic films about men and integrity (Body and Soul), men and power (All the King’s Men), men and courage (They Came to Cordura), has here become a negative of himself, an exponent of the exquisite, stylistically suspended, sexually unsettled. 2 He has been invaded by that same vampire. In Jean Seberg’s own words: “People had often reproached him [Rossen] with being heavy, with being the elephant in the china shop; Lilith, on the contrary, is a magnificent crystal, so clear and so pure that it can only break itself. Madness is often sordid; he knew, in this last film, how to go beyond appearances, towards something very beautiful, in which all his personal unhappinesses were buried” (Cahiers du cinéma, April 1966). There are other paradoxes, less ineffable, in Rossen’s development: for one, that the writer of 1930s Warner Bros. social problem pictures, the embodiment of Popular Front values, should be dealing in his last film with a kind of élite of the insane (“the heroes of this universe”, as a Poplar Lodge doctor calls them). There is one account of the film, in Film Quarterly (Winter 1966/67), which describes its social perspective in terms that would have been antithetical to that earlier Rossen: “Rossen establishes the contrast between the petty emptiness of the surrounding American small town and the mysterious beauty of the house of the mad by a contrast in photographic tone: the hard realism of secondhand stores, darkly dreary houses, crowds at a fair, the cluttered cheapness of the home of an empty marriage, as opposed to the softened landscapes of the asylum”. The “petty emptiness” of that small town might once have been a repository of positive values for Rossen and other New York intellectuals – such as the writer/director Abraham Polonsky, who wrote the screenplay for Rossen’s boxing film, Body and Soul (1947) – who went to Hollywood in the 30s and 40s as committed socialists and (at least for a time) Communist Party members. Both men fell foul of the House Committee on Un‐American Activities in 1951, the Communist witch‐hunt, and the ensuing blacklist in Hollywood. Polonsky refused to co‐operate with the Committee by naming Communist associates, and only continued to work until the late 60s by writing under pseudonyms. After first refusing to co‐operate, Rossen recanted in 1953 and did name names. “His motives were undoubtedly complex, and have been the subject of debate and disagreement among others in the industry” (Film Quarterly, op. cit.). Was this one of the ‘detours’ referred to by Jean‐André Fieschi? Equally, it is tempting to see in Lilith a final act of self‐transformation before the withdrawal into silence. But it is also the case that Rossen, already ill at the time, blamed his post‐Lilith withdrawal on his conflicts with Warren Beatty (“It wasn’t worth that kind of grief”). And he did have a further project in mind, about a poor community living in the shadow of the rocket sites of Cape Canaveral. As for the “softened landscapes” of Poplar Lodge, some dialogue at the beginning of Lilith points out that they are bought at a price, and that the Lodge is very different from the state mental institution. In other ways, that earlier Rossen is echoed in this final one – although again these tend to be an index to transformations. Lilith, who even thinks of herself as an unnatural force, at times refers to herself in the third person: “You know what is wrong with Lilith? She wants to possess all the men in the world”. This rhymes with the dying reverie of Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), the populist demagogue of All the King’s Men (1949), a man who has projected himself as a world‐shaking force, 3 only to be stopped by an assassin’s bullet: “Could have been the whole world – Willie Stark”. At the end of Body and Soul, John Garfield’s boxer rounds on a crooked promoter after refusing to throw a fight: “What are you going to do – kill me? Everybody dies” (which tauntingly repeats something the promoter has said). Alone in his room, watching TV coverage of the war he has just fought, Vincent Bruce picks up the line – “Everybody dies” – although now it is no longer the boxer’s cynical taunt but a real intimation of mortality, a clue to the haunting. In the Cahiers du cinéma article by Jean‐André Fieschi quoted above, he suggests that Rossen’s penultimate and probably still most famous film, The Hustler (1961), may have been a pre‐Lilith. It was not, as people had thought it, he says, “a slightly late prototype, a too long delayed culmination, of the film noir of the 1950s”, but a film “endowed with a quality of irreducible witchery”. Fieschi quotes another writer, Claude Ollier, on the irreducible quality of Lilith: “One has the constant impression that something else is happening that is escaping, being only briefly suggested by acting and dialogue… A sense of indecision hovers permanently over this strange film; and the final explanations are not enough to dispel it”. (This essay has been revised and expanded from an article, “The beginner’s Rossen”, which appeared in the Monthly Film Bulletin, No.624, January 1986.) _____________________________________ 4.