His 1949 film All the King's Men won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress, while Rossen was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director.

[4] As a youth, he attended New York University,[citation needed] hustled pool and fought some prizefights[5] - the latter two providing crucial background for his two greatest films, The Hustler and Body and Soul, respectively.

[6] He started his theatrical career as a stage manager and director in stock and off-Broadway productions,[2] mainly in the social and radical theaters that flourished in New York in the early and mid-1930s, as did John Huston, Elia Kazan and Joseph Losey.

A year later Rossen directed Birthright, in which Maibaum attacked Nazism,[8] which had just triumphed in Germany with the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler in 1933.

Although the play closed after four performances,[8] Warner Bros. director Mervyn LeRoy was so impressed that he signed Rossen to a personal screenwriting contract.

[5][9][10] For his first credit in Hollywood, in 1937 Rossen co-wrote with Abem Finkel a script based on the prosecution of crime lord Lucky Luciano and eventually titled Marked Woman.

[5] Rossen's first solo script was for They Won't Forget (1937), a fictionalized account of the lynching of Leo Frank, featuring Lana Turner in her debut performance.

[11] Dust Be My Destiny, co-written in 1939 by Rossen, is the story of a fugitive from justice who is eventually acquitted with help from an attorney and a journalist, the latter arguing that "a million boys all over the country" were in a similar plight.

[18] Blues in the Night, written by Rossen and two colleagues and released in 1941, shows a group of jazz musicians traveling in the Depression.

Rossen served as the body's chairman until 1944 and advocated the opening of a Second Front to support West European resistance against the Nazis.

However, his work for Hollywood Writers Mobilization and for the Communist Party forced him to abandon some partly developed film projects, including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which John Huston eventually directed in 1948.

[22] As this crime melodrama proved a modest success, Roberts Productions signed Rossen to direct Abraham Polonsky's script of Body and Soul,[23] described by Bob Thomas as "possibly the best prizefight film ever made.

[23] Following the success of Body and Soul, Rossen formed his own production company and signed with Columbia Pictures a contract that gave him wide autonomy over every second film that he made at the studio.

[25] As a requirement for his participation in the film, Rossen had to write to Columbia's Harry Cohn saying that he was no longer a Communist Party member.

[23][26] Cohn's critiques of the draft of Rossen's script included scrapping a framing structure that was difficult for audiences to follow and several improvements in the relationships and motivations of characters.

Warner reportedly accused Rossen of incorporating communist propaganda in scripts and fired him as a result, though some believe he was also unhappy with the writers’ union activities.

[33] Rossen was one of 19 "unfriendly witnesses" subpoenaed in October 1947 by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the second Red Scare but was one of eight not called to testify.

This, and his inability to find work, brought Rossen, like his friend, ex-Communist Elia Kazan, back to the committee in May 1953, where he identified 57 people as Communists.

[45] Rossen hoped Alexander the Great (1956) would be a blockbuster,[35] but the majority of the reviews criticized the film for failing to keep the audience's interest.

[48] He was named Best Director by the New York Film Critics Circle[49] and shared with Carroll the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written Drama.

"[3] However, at the time of his death Rossen was planning Cocoa Beach, a script he conceived in 1962, showing the hopes and struggles of transients in a local community and contrasting this with nearby Cape Canaveral, which Leftist writer Brian Neve described as a "symbol of America's imperial reach".

In his films for Warner Brothers between 1937 and 1944, consistent themes were the conditions of working people, the portrayal of gangsters and racketeers, and opposition to fascism.

[5] After Dust Be My Destiny, written by Rossen and released in 1939, Frank Nugent, who regularly reviewed for The New York Times, complained about Warner Brothers' long line of melodramas about boys from poor neighborhoods.

For the earlier pattern Farber cited Rossen's 1946 script The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, which was over melodramatic but portrayed a woman consumed by power, money and success.

[55] All of Rossen's playscripts were adaptations except Marked Woman, Racket Buster and Alexander the Great, based on real events.

[60] While head of production at Warner, Hal Wallis considered that some of his best films – including The Roaring Twenties, Marked Woman and The Sea Wolf – were written by Rossen.

Thomas Schatz regarded All the King's Men as possibly the best of the genre, as it examined alcoholism, adultery, political corruption and the influence of journalism.

[68] The New Republic praised the cast and Rossen's "sure, economical" direction, but thought the script "strains hard to give an air of menace and criminality.

[73] Ebert also praised Rossen's decision to shoot the film in the "stygian gloom of the billiard parlor" created by black-and-white.

[74][75] Nina Leibman regarded Lilith as the most extreme of the American film industry's applications, or rather misapplications, of psychoanalytic concepts, as the patient is already psychotic and has a track record of previous conquests.