Word: rossen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cinema producer had a story too. Robert (All the King's Men) Rossen testified that he was a member of the Communist Party from 1937 to 1947, and contributed no less than $40,000 to its causes. He recalled the names of 57 other Hollywood characters (most of them had been named before) whom he had known as Communists. In 1951, Rossen refused to tell the committee about his Communist past. Since then, he said, he had decided that he should speak out for "the security and safety of the nation...
...Brave Bulls (Columbia) is Producer-Director Robert (All the King's Men) Rossen's ambitious attempt to put Tom Lea's bestselling 1949 novel on the screen. Visually, the picture is thick with the hot, dusty atmosphere of the bull ring and the Mexican locale in which it nourishes. But beneath its colorful surface, the film is dramatically weak and confused...
While faithfully retelling the story of a matador (Mel Ferrer) who loses his nerve and gets it back again, Producer Rossen upsets the book's delicate balance between the tawdriness and nobility of bullfighting. He succeeds best, if at undue length, in picturing the bull ring much as he showed the prize ring in Body and Soul-as a commercialized racket that feeds its parasites, thrills its fickle crowds and lacerates its heroes in body and spirit. Despite some lip service in dialogue and commentary, he fails to do justice to bullfighting as an art, a code of honor...
Like the script, Actor Ferrer* never gets inside the character, and Mexico's Actress Miroslava, a blonde edition of Rita Hayworth, protrudes from the Mexican atmosphere like a stock Hollywood femme fatale. Aficionados can take some solace in Director Rossen's bullfighting scenes, well-staged within Production Code limits, and the movie's wealth of such local color as a bull-breeding ranch and a religious street pageant...
...Brave Bulls. He gets good support from Stack and Actresses Page and Katy Jurado, who seem more convincing as Mexican women than Miroslava. Directed by onetime matador Budd Boetticher and edited (without screen credit) by Producer Wayne's good friend, John Ford, the bullfighting sequences outdo Rossen's in stylized grace and violent excitement...