On Casty's Robert Rossen

On Casty's Robert Rossen Robert Rossen: The Films and Politics of a Blacklisted Idealist. By Alan Casty. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2012. 276 pp., ISBN 978-0-7864-6981-9 (pbk). US $45.

Alan Casty is on a mission-an important (if not particularly Jewish) one, in more ways than he may have been aware. Casty's declared purpose in Robert Rossen: The Films and Politics of a Blacklisted Idealist is twofold: first, to raise writer-director Rossen from comparative cinematic obscurity to the pinnacle of the auteurist Pantheon; and second, more controversially, to reassign the brunt of moral turpitude from those who, like Rossen, named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to those who denounced coopera- tion with the HUAC yet remained silent about the far graver depredations of the Soviet Union. Along the way, Casty also manages to enhance our understanding of the creative process during the classical Hollywood period.

The revising upward of Rossen's filmmaking reputation is a bit of a stretch-not because his work is not worthy of major accolades but because it has not been denied them to the extent that Casty claims. Casty himself quotes glowing reviews of several Rossen films and cites Cahiers du cinema's posthumous dedication in 1966 (he died earlier that year) of a "special issue to Rossen's work" (213). Nor is Casty's complaint that such praise was limited to Europe borne out by even a cursory gloss of the literature. In regard to the post-World War II "change in style and content that would be as radical as the economic and social dislocations of the changeover to sound," Louis Giannetti and Scott Eyman assert in Flashback: A Brief History of Film (1986), "No single film demonstrated this change in attitude quite as succinctly as Robert Rossen's Body and Soul [1947]."1 Thomas Schatz, in Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (1999), calls Rossen's All the King's Men (1949) "a stylistic tour...