The Boy with Green Hair
Recently Restored
With Dean Stockwell, Pat O'Brien, Robert Ryan.
US, 1948, 35mm, color, 82 min.
Print source: Museum of Modern Art
Losey's remarkable debut feature combines the magical realism of a children's story with the bold, message-driven radicalism of the Depression-era proletariat theater where he received his first crucial training as a director. Dean Stockwell stars as the titular boy whose mysterious transformation awakens the fears and prejudices dormant in his small hometown. A cult favorite and among Losey's most enduring films, The Boy with Green Hair is also one of the more outspokenly Leftist films of the 1940s, a final vestige of Roosevelitan Hollywood on the eve of the Red Scare that would count Losey as one of its most prominent victims.
PRECEDED BY
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Pete Roleum and His Cousins
Directed by Joseph Losey.
US, 1939, 35mm, color, 16 min.
Print source: Cinémathèque Québéçoise
Despite Losey's involvement with leftist politics and culture in the 1930s, his first film was made, ironically, for the oil industry, to be shown at the Petroleum Building of the 1939 New York World's Fair. Pete Roleum explains the importance of oil for modern industry and manufacturing and warns of dire consequences should the world's supply run short. The stop-motion animation was done by Charley Bowers, the remarkable filmmaker (and slapstick comic) whose long-forgotten work has recently been rediscovered. Shot in color and 3-D, the film is now available only in 2-D and in an incomplete state, missing a few minutes of footage.
