The Brave Bulls (Robert Rossen, 1951)

The new 4K restoration of the film – courtesy of Sony/Columbia – plays on November 8 at Harvard Film Archive as part of the retrospective co-curated by Haden Guest and me, Columbia 101: The Rarities. — EK

The Brave Bulls was Robert Rossen’s final film in a cycle of four complex explorations of corruption and fear (Johnny O'clock, The Undercover Man, All the King's Men) that he either directed or wrote for Columbia. A brutally frank bullfighting drama, the film follows a matador (Mel Ferrer) who, beginning to crack under the pressure of his profession and a newfound fear of the ring, seeks to reclaim control over his life. Anthony Quinn plays a typically Rossenian character—a charismatic manipulator who, like Broderick Crawford in All the King’s Men, holds the power to both redeem and destroy.

Columbia’s postwar films often adopted a more documentary-like style, largely due to location shooting—less an aesthetic choice than a cost-cutting measure. Yet The Brave Bulls achieves a deeper sense of authenticity than many of its contemporaries, thanks in large part to James Wong Howe’s superb cinematography, which renders the sweat and sand of the bullring with tactile precision. Rossen, through his protagonist’s rejection of the glorification of self-destruction and death, interrogates the notion of martyrdom—as if anticipating his own confrontation with the House Un-American Activities Committee two years later, where he infamously named names. The film’s troubled and troubling narrative is infused with that same sense of moral anguish and doubt.