 He started his theatrical career as a stage manager and director in stock and off @-@ Broadway productions , 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 . In 1932 Rossen directed John Wexley 's Steel , about labor agitation , and Richard Maibaum 's The Tree , about a lynching . A year later Rossen directed Birthright , in which Maibaum attacked Nazism , which had just triumphed in Germany with the dictatorship of Adolf Hitler in 1933 . 
