I’ve been curious about The Boy with Green Hair (1948) because it was was the first feature film by blacklisted director Joseph Losey and blacklisted screenwriter Ben Barzman,
and they were pretty proud of it. Both men subsequently fled to Europe with their families rather than testify before HUAC, and managed to keep in work. Losey, who went on to direct The Go-Between — from a screenplay by Harold Pinter — was so successful, he never went home.
I admire those blacklisted artists who didn’t sell out. The first book of my historical mystery series opens in London, where my heroine, aspiring actress Cara Walden, is living with her brother Gray, a blacklisted screenwriter who chose exile over betraying his fellow travelers, just like Barzman and Losey. So I was prepared to like this film. Really, I was. But I cringed the whole way through, starting with the chorus singing “Nature Boy” over the credits.
“Nature Boy” was Nat King Cole’s first hit. It’s got a haunting melody (inspired by a Yiddish tune) even if the lyrics are inane. Everyone recorded it. At the risk of hijacking this review, I will point you to the memorable versions by Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and the Gypsy Jazz guitar trio led by Romane and Stochelo Rosenberg. Worth noting are covers by Django Reinhardt, David Bowie (from the film Moulin Rouge), Johnny Mathis, Celine Dion, and, for curiosity’s sake, period pieces by Bobby Darrin, Michael Jackson, Grace Slick and the Great Society, Cher, and James Brown. There’s also Leonard Nimoy’s unforgettable version, from his album A Touch of Leonard Nimoy. (Just try and forget it. . .)
The guy who wrote “Nature Boy” has a claim on being the first hippie. eden ahbez (in the e.e. cummings mode, he preferred to leave his name in lowercase) ate raw food, lived out in the open, under the L (for Love) of the Hollywood sign, was interested in mysticism — all this in the 1940s. After his song made it to the top of the charts, he was featured in Life magazine.
He wrote songs for Eartha Kitt, Sam Cooke, Hoagy Carmichael. People made pilgrimages to meet him and learn from him, he was such a sage, from various members of the Beat generation to Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, novelist Thomas Pynchon, and wistful singer-songwriter (and Bob Dylan nemesis) Donovan. You can read more about ahbez in a recent Vogue piece. I understand there’s also a documentary in the works.
Such fascinating stuff I discovered, researching this picture! But the picture itself? I can’t disagree with Bosley Crowther, who called it “mere sentimental entertainment” in his New York Times review. “One gets the uncomfortable feeling,” Crowther complained, “that it is just a bright adult notion gone wrong.” Actually, I’d quibble with the use of the word “adult.” Hard to believe adults wrote this. The original story by Betsy Beaton was a parable about racism. A boy’s hair turns green, people shun him for being different. As if that’s all there was to prejudice. The best Variety could come up with was “well-intentioned,” which does describe characters like the child psychologist played by Robert Ryan and the boy’s foster parent, “Gramp” (Pat O’Brien), an Irish singing waiter. No, I’m not kidding.
There’s an anti-war message to The Boy with Green Hair, but it seems tacked on. The cloying sincerity of this picture is revealing of the naivety of late-forties activists, I suppose. In this regard, eden abbez’s song was an inspired choice.
His girl promises she’ll be waiting for him when he gets out. Not your typical Western ending, but it fit with the image of the damaged, war weary young veteran.
“It smells so incredibly evil,” says Gene Tierney, who’s there to do a little slumming. “I didn’t think such a place existed except in my own imagination. . . Anything could happen here.”
She was reduced to selling herself after her abandonment, and describes the brutal treatment she endured: “My soles cut open and pebbles sewn inside to keep me from running away . . .”
features an interracial romance between a white missionary played by Barbara Stanwyck and a Chinese warlord (Swedish heartthrob Nils Asther in yellowface). Stanwyck’s character is captured by the warlord and she has an erotic dream about him, imagining him as a brutal and passionate lover, although he turns out to be a gentleman and, in a departure from the novel upon which the film was based, their mutual attraction remains chaste. Miscegenation was taboo, even before the Hays Code, and General Yen was yanked eight days into its run, the sight of “a Chinaman attempting to romance with a pretty and supposedly decent young American white woman,” as Sam Shain put it in Variety, too shocking for audiences at the time. Nevertheless, the film was selected for the opening of Radio City Music Hall.
rendering, a brilliant, quiet man who weighs his words and never gives in to his base instincts. Sure, he gets the better of Henry VIII’s henchman, Thomas Cromwell, but it’s largely a matter of out-classing him, rather than descending to Cromwell’s level.
in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, but you won’t find Paul Scofield calling anyone a dog in A Man for All Seasons, let alone using words like vomit. He is far too erudite. Imprisoned in the Tower, he begs not for creature comforts—furs to ward off the chill, or food—but for more reading material, a request that the dastardly Cromwell denies him.
from Hitchcock’s 1951 psychological thriller, Strangers on a Train, because it highlights the film’s zaniness. Robert Walker’s character (Bruno) is creepy, right from the beginning. You can’t imagine why Farley Granger’s character (Guy) agrees to dine alone with him in his compartment, even if the business of their feet touching beneath the table in the train’s bar suggests a homosexual attraction. 
tennis rackets and an engraving: A to G. Bruno borrowed it and we just know he’s going to use it to implicate Guy in the murder of his unsympathetic wife (who was killed by Bruno). In a tense scene, Bruno drops the lighter down a storm sewer and we see his hand, coming through the grate, fishing around among the debris, a wet leaf, a chewing gum wrapper, a bit of orange peel and a scrap of paper, each item carefully selected by Hitchcock.
of white innocence (as was Doris Day, and Grace Kelly in High Noon). 
Laboriously, we dissected the book’s message, extracting solemn truths like that line of Atticus’s: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
conveyed his hopelessness so powerfully. 
Implausible? It’s hard to believe that Jimmy Stewart’s naïve character, Jefferson Smith, made it to adulthood, let alone to Washington. He doesn’t know how laws work, he doesn’t even know the rules of order that govern the Senate. Somehow this is endearing. His cynical secretary’s (Jean Arthur) faith in humanity is restored by Smith’s straightforward ignorance. She’s more than happy to educate him.
offered it to him. He held Lincoln in such reverence, he said, that it would have been like “portraying Christ himself on film.” But Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) aims to show the great man before he was great, warts and all. (In fact, between the nose and the wart, it took three hours in make-up to get Fonda looking the part.) Honest Abe was not above cheating in the Fourth of July tug-of-war to help his team win. That self-deprecating humor of his may have disarmed dull-witted Midwesterners, but we in the audience recognize a skillful manipulator when we see one.
I’ve read that the movie is routinely used in classics courses, to make the lessons of great epics such as the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid accessible to undergraduates. Achilles, the hero archetype of Homeric legend, is isolated, set apart by his divine origins. Too perfect for the ordinary world.
Deathless Prose 