THE BOY WITH GREEN HAIR: Blu-ray (RKO, 1948) Warner Archive

Anyone surprised to discover producer, Dore Schary pulling the strings behind director, Joseph Losey’s The Boy with Green Hair (1948) need only remember that Schary, in his day, considered himself as a sort of cultural mandarin of the ‘message picture’ – a subgenre practically pioneered by him, in which he considered it the purpose of filmed works to educate more so than to entertain. Owing to Schary’s verve for providing such teachable moments in lieu of mere escapist fluff, The Boy with Green Hair is perhaps Schary’s most furtive effort, as it tries to tell a tale exposing racial intolerance without ever to actually bring ‘race’ itself to the forefront of its storytelling. More directly, the picture remains an allegory of the anti-war ilk, suggesting war always lays waste to the innocents of the world. To fully understand the picture’s modus operandi, it might first be prudent to reconsider Schary as its crusader. Born Isadore Schary, with a pontificating passion to cover virtually all the bases in the picture-making biz over the next 40-plus years, from playwright, to director/producer, screenwriter, and finally, self-important mogul, Schary would have liked nothing better than to possess the wherewithal to micromanage an empire of MGM’s formidable size and structure as his ultimate factory for producing intellectually highbrow and stimulating films saturated with his strong liberal bias. That he attempted to impose his passion, first at cut-rate RKO, then MGM, the king of glossy features (the former, financially strapped to fulfill such commitments, the latter, too entrenched in its uber-nostalgic treacle and schmaltz, to creatively clash with the status quo) proved his ultimate undoing. 

Schary’s theatrical start in 1927, came with an inauspicious invite to partake of the movies. Based solely on Schary’s prose, producer, Walter Wanger mistook him for a woman. A more formal introduction to Columbia’s maharajah, Harry Cohn, gave Schary his official start in the picture biz. Over the years, a myth has evolved to infer Schary never wrote ‘commercial’ product. But this simply is not the case. Before becoming socially invested in ‘message’ pictures, Schary wrote for the popular masses, working at virtually all the majors in Hollywood, and with considerable successes to tout. In the years before an unhealthy rivalry evolved between Schary and his boss, MGM’s L.B. Mayer was rather impressed by Schary’s progress, promoting him to producer of their ‘B’ unit. It was only after Schary’s five-year sweethearts’ deal at RKO soured, and, he became Loew’s Incorporated president, Nicholas Schenck’s ‘numero uno’ pick to return to Metro as its VP in Charge of Production that Mayer began to show his jealous streak. But all of this was future forecast at the time The Boy with Green Hair went into production.

The Boy with Green Hair is…well…bizarre. It was one of the last movies Schary put into production at RKO, and it lost money, incurring studio head, Howard Hughes’ considerable displeasure. In it, a precocious Dean Stockwell stars as Peter Fry, a war orphan subjected to ridicule after his hair puzzlingly turns avocado. There is a bone-chilling moment when ghostly visages depicting various poster orphans appear to Pete in a hallucination to explain his purpose in life. Are they speaking to him from the great beyond or merely channeling the tyke’s frustrations and imagination after being branded a freak by his contemporaries? The screenplay by Ben Barzman and Alfred Lewis Levitt is based on Betsy Beaton’s short story of the same name, first published in This Week, a nationally syndicated Sunday circular.  All in all, Joseph Losey’s directorial debut strikes at the story’s somewhat crudely designed pacifist’s gong more to impress Schary than the audience, beating its simple tome of tolerance into the earth until both it and our patience have turned to dust. Layered in, an anti-bigotry message, made unintelligible by Howard Hughes' attempts to spin his own pro-war propaganda in stride, and, the antiseptic ballad, ‘Nature Boy’ – seemingly out of place here, but soon, a hit parade fav sung by Nat King Cole. Twelve-year-old Dean Stockwell was already a veteran in the picture biz, a fine-looking lad with strong features and sweetly naïve eyes who, as Peter Fry, becomes a symbol for war orphans everywhere. Losey resisted the urge to turn this piece into a maudlin weepy and, via his steely command of the material, met with Stockwell’s built-in goodness and strength of character, he navigates around the pitfalls of rank sentimentality for the most part.

We can blame the blunting of Schary’s ‘message’ on Hughes latter-day tinkering with this raw footage. Reportedly, Hughes tried to get Stockwell to dub in a pro-American military might line of dialogue which Stockwell emphatically refused to do. And owing to Losey’s ‘cutting’ in the camera, there was, in fact, very little Hughes could do to significantly alter its storytelling. Both Losey and screenwriter, Ben Barzman would be blacklisted by HUAC shortly after the picture’s release as ‘obvious’ communist sympathizers. Under pressure, each refused to name names. The picture is also noteworthy for actor, Robert Ryan, stepping beyond his usual form as the cinema’s favorite ‘disreputable’; herein, as empathetic child psychologist, Dr. Evans, who gets the initially mute and head-shaven Peter to regale us with his tale in flashback. Through this narration, we discover Pete’s parents left him in limbo to forge on to London from whence they never returned. Placed in the care of Gramp Fry (Pat O'Brien), Pete’s assimilation is thwarted when his hair suddenly turns green (a reflection of his status as a war orphan, but also a symbol of youth and renewal). Thereafter, he is shunned by his schoolmates, teacher, and the rest of the community. Allegorical to a fault, The Boy with Green Hair retains an air of lithe ambition to remain above it all. In spots, its fantasy elements almost shine through, repeatedly anchored, and occasionally dragged down by Schary’s vim to preach. In the moments when Losey almost gets command, he manages a careful balance between fantasy and Schary’s distinctly ‘liberal’ indoctrination of the audience with anti-bigotry/anti-war/anti-everything conservative message. Alas, there just are not enough of those moments to go around.

Made in an epoch in the American fabric of life when scopious racial discrimination was not only socially accepted but, in certain places, preferred, The Boy with Green Hair is unafraid to critique this status quo, exposing the subliminal profiling of a typical small town whose inhabitants suffer, but later indulge and feed off their own social anxieties, niggling mortifications and laidback viciousness against the most innocent cohort among them, simply because he is different.  The painful denial of young master Fry’s hope to merely assimilate, just to be considered ‘as good as’ and by his peers, unfurls against the picture’s post-war glint of anxiety over nuclear annihilation. But it also exposes an even more dreadful reality to the post-war rhetoric about America’s prosperity, revealing it as out of sorts from within, and, with the seemingly promised panacea for peace, made tinny and untrue by prejudice. At best, the picture tries too hard to fit too many dissonantly teachable moments into its slender 82-min. runtime.

In earnest, The Boy with Green Hair opens with the discovery by a police officer (Brick Sullivan) of an almost mute and head-shaven, Peter Fry wandering down a lonely road. Taken to the precinct, Pete is approached by the kindly Dr. Evans and Dr. Knudson (Samuel S. Hinds). Through Evans’ gentle coaxing, Peter begins to open up about the events that led to his discovery. After being sent by his parents to stay with several negligent aunts and uncles, Peter finally found a home with Gramp, a retired actor. Encouraged by Gramp to attend school, for a brief wrinkle in time life seemed to be progressing in a positive direction. Peter’s classmates are involved in providing aid to war orphans in Europe and Asia, leaving Pete to suddenly realize he too is among the many faces depicted on posters around the school. The realization his parents were likely killed in the London blitz causes Peter to become gravely concerned, especially when he overhears some adults in town discussing the possibility of another war looming on the horizon.

That evening, while towel-drying his hair after a bath, Peter realizes his mane has suddenly turned green. The townspeople he once perceived as his friends turn ugly in their taunts, leaving Peter feeling betrayed. He runs away. Alone in the nearby woods, Peter is confronted by ghostly orphaned children whose faces he recognizes from the posters at school. They champion his ‘difference’ and suggest his green hair marks him as their spokesman, to spread outstretched hands of tolerance to the world at large. Peter elects to return to Gramp and become a beacon of hope for the hopeful, but downtrodden. Alas, the townsfolk urge Gramp to shave Peter’s head to disguise his peculiarity. Peter returns to the woods, seeking guidance from these ghostly orphans, but instead is pursued by school bullies who try to cut his hair. Sometime later, Peter relents to peer pressure and has the town barber (David Clarke) shave him bald. That evening, Peter places a baseball cap atop his pate and, carrying his baseball bat, departs from home, seemingly, for the last time.

We return to the present. Dr. Evans kindly explains that righteous people of faith do not shy away from their commitments, regardless of the challenges they face along the way. Peter agrees. Reunited with Gramp in the station’s waiting room, Gramp reads a letter written by Peter’s father, intended for his 16th birthday. In it, Peter’s father nobly suggests there are moral duties we must all accept in our lives; things worth fighting and dying for, and, encourages his son to go forth into the world to remind it of its moral duty in self-preservation. Emotionally stirred, Peter vows to become a spokesman for the change he seeks to find. Observing the boy’s newly unearthed faith in the future, Dr. Evans confides in Dr. Knudson that it is immaterial whether or not the boy’s hair was ever green. The boy’s hope for the future is just and promising. That is all that matters. The good doctors observe as Gramp takes Peter home.

The Boy with Green Hair is a movie that challenges its audience to dig deeper into its collective soul for a little hard-won faith. At the time of its theatrical release, it made no ripples at the box office and was considered a minor flop, overwrought and dogmatic in its messaging. Afterward, Schary departed RKO for MGM. And although his initial forays there were promising enough (1949’s Battleground is a masterpiece), Schary’s encroaching liberalism was soon to conflict with studio head, L.B. Mayer’s staunch conservatism. Worse, after Mayer’s unceremonious ousting from power in 1951, Schary was left to his own accord to pursue precisely the sorts of passion projects that flew in the face of Mayer’s well-ensconced glamor-factory mentality. As the decade wore on, while Schary did allow MGM to continue producing the sort of frothy spectacles for which it was best known, his own bent for ‘educating’ an audience, sometimes ahead of achieving its entertainment value, would ultimately derail his authority as Metro’s figurehead. In his last year at MGM, Schary tried to return to ‘commercially viable’ product to satisfy the stockholders, with 3 personally-supervised pics: The Swan (1956), The Last Hunt (1956) and Designing Woman (1957). None made money.

The Warner Archive (WAC) debuts another winner on Blu-ray. The Boy with Green Hair has never looked good on home video, with its wan color palette, further distorted by considerable fading, anemic contrast and a barrage of age-related artifacts. So, it is rather startling to see this 1080p transfer with its richly satisfying and bold spectrum of hues, perfectly in register, and sporting solid contrast, excellent detail, and, a complete eradication of time’s toll on the original camera negative.  No doubt about it, WAC has done their due diligence once more and the results are very impressive. The 2.0 DTS mono is adequate for this dialogue-driven movie. Apart from a short subject, also to feature Dean Stockwell, and a badly worn trailer, there are no extras. Bottom line: Schary’s message pic may not be the best movie ever made, but it remains thought-provoking in spots, and mostly diverting, despite Schary’s best attempts to make it sober and educational. The Blu-ray is excellent. Judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

3

VIDEO/AUDIO

4.5

EXTRAS

0