Joseph Losey (1948)

Losey’s first feature is clearly symbolic but the multiple meanings of the symbols are increasingly confusing.  The film was introduced at BFI by Losey’s grandson Marek, who read out correspondence – written 20 years after the picture’s original release – between the director and (I think) the writer, Ben Barzman, in which both men acknowledged they had tried to say too much.  That is putting it mildly. The Wikipedia article on The Boy with Green Hair shows what is presumably the original poster, which carries the legend, ‘Please don’t tell why his hair turned green! – After you’ve seen … ‘.   This don’t-spoil-the-surprise instruction would have been unnecessary in my case:  I’m not sure I understand why the eponymous hero’s hair changed colour.

At the start of the film, a young, shaven-headed runaway is in a police station.  A child psychologist persuades this silent child to speak and the boy tells his story.  He’s Peter, a war orphan (his parents were killed in London during the Blitz), living in a small town in (I guess) the American mid-west with a kind of foster-grandparent, Gramps.   One morning, Peter gets out of the bath and discovers his hair has, unaccountably, turned green.  (The previous evening he and Gramps have had a conversation in which Gramps has recommended always having a plant – a bit of greenery – in the house:  ‘Makes you kinda hopeful somehow’, or words to that effect.)  Although a couple of the local kids are briefly intrigued, they and other children are soon – like virtually the entire adult population of the place from the word go – treating Peter with great suspicion.  At one point, he’s trying to escape a gang of boys and finds himself in a glade, where he encounters another group of children, of various ages and ethnicity.  These are the war orphans from around the world, whose photographs Peter had previously seen on a schoolroom wall:  his teacher, Miss Brand, has been doing a project with the class, trying to raise their awareness of the orphans’ plight.  One of the orphans tells Peter that his green hair, far from being a stigma, is a great gift – his uniqueness will enable him to attract everyone’s attention and get across to them that ‘war is bad for children’.  Peter is inspired by what he hears and rushes back home to spread the word but the townspeople grow increasingly hostile and even kindly Gramps eventually agrees that Peter should have his hair cut off.  The barber does the necessary.  (The image of the hanks of shorn hair on the floor is striking although the barber is remarkably light-hearted about it, considering the traumatising effect the green hair has had on him and the rest of the town.)  Peter runs away and is picked up by the police.  At the end of the film, when he has told his tale and emerges into the lobby of the police station, Gramps, Miss Brand and the family’s doctor, Knudson, are waiting to take Peter home.   He tells them that he’s convinced that his hair will grow back green and that he’s once more determined to deliver his message.

Although the references to war orphans and post-war international political tensions are there throughout, they don’t seem to connect with the green hair until Peter meets the orphaned children.  (This sequence is staged very strangely:  the impact of the transformation of the other kids from pictures on the wall to real human beings is weakened by Losey’s filming the scene as a near-tableau, so the orphans are barely animated anyway.)  Up to this point, the hair seems to signify someone who appears different (or – to extrapolate from that – who has qualities which it’s hard for normal people to comprehend):  the film might be read as a straightforward anti-discrimination tract.   Once Peter starts his anti-war campaign, his hair is linked with the political message – a message which, it’s implied, is a difficult one for people to hear and accept.  There are no illustrations, however, of negative reactions (or reactions of any kind) to what Peter has to say; people still just don’t like the way he looks.   And the meeting with the war orphans sits oddly with the earlier scene when these children appeared on posters at the school.  In that sequence, we don’t get the sense that Peter’s classmates are ignoring the orphans – it’s more that Peter resents being himself regarded as one of them, so much so that he fights with the boy who says, ‘You’re a war orphan too’ (and guiltily defaces the photo of the adolescent boy orphan who later gives him moral instruction).

Losey and Barzman are so preoccupied with presenting a parable that they fail to bring it to life as drama, and so fixated on the green hair that they treat the reactions to it purely as illustrations of their political and humanitarian message(s).  They don’t bother to dramatise the fact that the change of colour – regardless of how much or little people are disposed to tolerate it – is a mystery.  The goodies – Gramps, Miss Brand, Dr Knudson – have no problem with the green hair but recognise that those less enlightened than them will give Peter a hard time.  They don’t see his hair as extraordinary – they see it as a problem because of its effect on the narrow-minded.  (It’s as if this virtuous trio can accept the hair without comment because they’ve seen the script and know that it’s symbolic.)  It appears too that the green hair is luminous:  if not, what is the explanation of the scene in which Peter worriedly puts on a concealing cap to walk through the streets to visit Dr Knudson but the benighted community, who’ve not seen his new topping before, stare at him even though very little hair is visible under his headgear?  The filmmakers clumsily impose the pacifist-cum-anti-discrimination moral of the story on a dramatic structure instead of absorbing you in a drama and allowing you to infer the moral.   They also fudge or blandly falsify important elements of the material.    Peter, miserable because he feels his parents abandoned him, grows to learn that they died on behalf of a noble cause – a pious fiat which doesn’t come close to addressing the boy’s understandable pain and incomprehension that his mother and father thought the children of the world mattered more than their own son.    Peter’s certainty that his hair will grow back green supplies a conveniently upbeat ending but, since Losey and Barzman ignore the implications of what this would mean for the way he lives his life, it’s hollow.

It might have been more convincing (though less commercial) if Peter had lost his hair.  That would have chimed with the character’s bereavement and have been enough for the other kids to make fun of him.  If the script had also given the adults in the town a reason to be wary of Gramps and Peter from the start, the film might then have been a more compelling story of accumulating, irrational antipathy to the unconventional.  The young Dean Stockwell, as Peter, certainly looks much more different with a shaved head than with his green wig (especially as poor continuity or lighting means that there are shots in which the green tinge disappears).   Stockwell, who was twelve when the film was released, had acted in pictures before, notably as Gregory Peck’s son in Elia Kazan’s Gentleman’s Agreement, but this must have been one of his first major roles.  He occasionally seems too proficiently precocious – there are moments when he looks as if he’s working out how an adult actor would handle a line or a gesture.  But his technical resources are impressive for one so young and he carries the picture – his unhappiness imposes itself.  The humorously saintly Gramps, as played by Pat O’Brien, is pretty hard to take and, whether or not this is a coincidence, seems to feature in a number of the more awkward  and stagy moments.  Barbara Hale (Della Street in Perry Mason) is the too-good-to-be-true schoolteacher, Samuel S Hinds the scarcely less benevolent Dr Knudson.   Although the role is impersonally written, Robert Ryan gives an intelligent, discreet performance as the psychologist.  One of Peter’s uncredited classmates, according to IMDB, is played by Russ Tamblyn.

The Boy with Green Hair isn’t a good picture but it has its place in cinema history – not just as Losey’s debut but also as a politically ambitious piece, released on the cusp of the McCarthy era, and as one of the last RKO pictures (Howard Hughes had just taken over the studio when the film came out – he didn’t, of course, commission it).   The film’s notably liberal producer Dore Schary was an active opponent of the anti-Communist witch hunts in Hollywood, as a result of which both Losey and Barzman were black-listed.    The film is remarkable too for its soundtrack.  There’s an intrusively overactive score (by Leigh Harline) and a baffling comedy number, performed by Pat O’Brien and Walter Catlett (both of whom had spent much of their careers in vaudeville).   In an interview in the BFI handout, Losey says that he should have done more of the film in this style – seeing things through the eyes of the child.  There’s no way you can believe that the fiercely solemn boy that Dean Stockwell suggests could ever have imagined this routine, even in the happy days before his parents went AWOL.  But, in addition to these musical aberrations, there’s also ‘Nature Boy’, which was written (by Eden Ahbez) as a theme song for this picture.  If Wikipedia is to be believed, the famous song immediately took off in a way that meant it was never primarily associated with The Boy with Green Hair (where it’s sung by an uncredited chorus).  During the summer of 1948, Nat King Cole’s version of ‘Nature Boy’ spent eight weeks at the top of the Billboard charts.  The film wasn’t released until November of that year.

2 June 2009