The Boy with Green Hair is a 1948 American fantasy-drama film in Technicolor directed by Joseph Losey in his feature film directorial debut.[4][5] It stars Dean Stockwell as Peter, a young war orphan who is subject to ridicule after his hair mysteriously turns green, and is based on the 1946 short story of the same name by Betsy Beaton. Co-stars include Pat O'Brien, Robert Ryan, and Barbara Hale.[6][7]
According to director Joseph Losey, "the original story was a fantasy about racial discrimination," but it was eventually rewritten as an allegorical anti-war story, with the message that war always damages children.[8]
Plot
Finding a curiously silent young runaway boy whose head has been completely shaved, small-town police call in a psychologist who discovers that the boy is a war orphan named Peter Fry. Peter tells the story of his life to the psychologist.
After staying with a series of neglectful aunts and uncles, he is sent to live with an understanding retired actor named Gramp. Peter starts attending school and begins living the life of a normal boy, until his class gets involved with trying to help war orphans in Europe and Asia.
Peter soon discovers that, like the children on the posters whose images haunt him, he too is a war orphan. The realization about his parents and the work helping the orphans makes Peter turn very serious, and he is further troubled when he overhears the adults around him talking about the world preparing for another war. The next day, after having a bath, Peter is drying his hair with a towel when, to his astonishment, he sees that his hair has turned green. After being taunted by the townspeople and his peers, he runs away.
Suddenly, appearing before him in a lonely part of the woods, are the orphaned children whose pictures he saw on the posters. They tell him that while he is a war orphan, his green hair can make a difference and he must tell people that war is dangerous for children. He leaves determined to deliver this message to any and all. Upon his return, the townspeople, upset about a boy who is now different, urge Gramp to encourage Peter to consider shaving his hair so that it might grow back normally. Peter returns to the woods looking for the orphan children from the posters, but is chased by a group of boys from school who attempt to cut his hair.
He later decides to get his head shaved and the town barber does the job. However, Peter leaves home in the middle of the night, wearing a baseball cap and carrying a baseball bat.
Back in the present, Peter finishes his story. The psychologist tells him that when someone really believes something, they don't run away. Peter leaves and is reunited with Gramp in the station's waiting room. Gramp reads him a letter written by his father, intended for his 16th birthday. Peter's father relates his beliefs about how some things are worth dying for, and if people forget, to "remind them, Peter." Encouraged to keep sharing his message, Peter is sure that his hair will grow back in green again. The psychologist tells Dr. Knudson that he does not care whether the boy's hair was ever actually green or not, but that he agreed with what the boy had to say. Gramp and Peter go home.
The Boy With the Green Hair was generously financed by RKO Pictures studios, having one of the biggest budgets of Losey’s film career.[10]
The making of The Boy With the Green Hair was fraught with delays and studio interference.[11][12]
Shortly after executive producer Dore Schary at RKO enlisted Losey to direct this screenplay in 1947, production manager Adrian Scott was subpoenaed by the HUAC, and the project was put on hold. When filming was finally underway, Schary was fired by RKO owner Howard Hughes. Through this period Losey was actively defending the blacklisted Hollywood Ten accused of Communist affiliations.[13]
Political controversy was the defining factor in Losey’s film at the outset of his career: “[T]he political turmoil of the late forties and early fifties in America eventually turned him from a Hollywood director into an expatriate director.”[14]
Losey fled to England in 1951 when he became a target for investigation by the HUAC.[15][16]
Score
The song "Nature Boy" written by eden ahbez and sung by an uncredited chorus was a primary theme of the score for the motion picture. Nat King Cole's version of "Nature Boy" shot to No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and remained there for eight weeks straight during the summer of 1948.
Cultural references
The 2009 film Battlestar Galactica: The Plan, which also starred (the adult) Dean Stockwell, made extensive reference to The Boy with Green Hair. Director Edward James Olmos, a fan of Stockwell's earlier film, had a replica of Peter's costume created for a war orphan character in The Plan named John. Olmos stated that he wanted John to have green hair, but the studio refused to allow it.[17]
Film industry trade magazineThe Exhibitor praised the film as "well-directed and well acted," but expressed skepticism of the film's commercial appeal due to "an apparent audience dislike of pictures with messages."[18] The film recorded a loss of $420,000.[19]
Jane Lockhart, writing in The Rotarian, considered it "an earnest effort that didn't quite come off" and stated that "its message somehow comes out as vague and unresolved, as if the makers couldn't quite make up their minds as to what they were trying to say."[20]
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times gave praise to Stockwell and O'Brien's performances, with the other actors being "adequate."[21] Crowther criticized the lack of clarity in regards to the boy's hair, stating that as a plot device it is "banal" and "strangely inconclusive" and that he was not certain whether the green hair was a figment of the boy's imagination or if "it is intended as a strictly whimsical device." Crowther concluded that "the gesture falls short of its aim."[21]
Although the film was passed with a 'U' certificate by the British Board of Film Censors on November 26, 1948, its UK release was held back until June 19, 1950.
Film critic Dan Callahan in Senses of Cinema credits producer Dore Schary for achieving this enduring “message” film in the form of “an allegory about war and intolerance.” Losey delivers “an extreme attack on conformity that condemns war and nuclear weapons.”[23][24][25]
Critic Foster Hirsch offers a critique on Losey’s use of metaphors:
Losey’s use of symbols is as awkward, and as technically immature, as the handling of the fantasy episodes…visual signaling is frequently overloaded, blunt, artless. But the film does demonstrate for the way ideas and states of mind can be communicated visually.[26]
Hirsch adds that “there are indications of the kind of composition and use of camera that Losey will develop and refine in his subsequent work.”[27]
Critics James Palmer and Michael Riley note that The Boy With the Green Hair resonates to this day as an “antiracist, pro-peace allegory or fable,” surviving contemporary efforts by RKO’s anti-communist Howard Hughes to undermine its message.[28]
Theme
Thematically, Losey hoped to establish a sharp visual contrast between the “the reality of the town” and its conformist residents with the “dreamlike” forested glade where the war orphans deliver their plea for universal peace.[29] He conceived of a “dream-like transformation” between two these realms emulating the startling transition between the black-and-white and color sequences in Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939). RKO declined to provide resources to create this effect.[30]
Losey expressed regret that the town scenes were not shot on location, so as to contrast with the studio-built fantasy glade scenes.[31]
Biographer Foster Hirsch argues that anti-war message is “really irrelevant.”[32] Losey’s treatment is less about war and more about an American establishment’s demand for social conformity:
[T]he primal fear of difference which the film dramatizes has only marginal connections to the general issue of “war,” but powerful links to the contemporary hunt for Communists.”[33]
Palmer and Riley observe that “the boy’s green hair [is] more effective as a symbol of individuality than” than as a metaphor suggesting “renewal or peace.”[35]
^Maras, 2012: “Losey’s left-wing views made him an obvious target of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and when summoned to appear before it in 1951, he refused and went into exile in England.”
^Callahan 2003: “Losey was forced to leave America after refusing to inform on his friends to the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a sign of his ultimate integrity.”
^Palmer and Riley, 1993 p. 5: “...remains popular today, [and] was attacked as a “ red” film, the theme of which Hollywood movie mogul Howard Hughes attempted to thwart. And p. 5: See here for Losey’s report of a “threat” from Hughes.
^Callahan 2003: “The scene that sticks…is the one where Dean Stockwell…is forced to give up his individuality, his green hair, in order to please the people of the small town he lives in.”
