The Boy with Green Hair(Joseph Losey, 1948) So, I would expect you to take a look at the headline, then look at the poster, and then look at the director and go..."waitaminnit—Joseph Losey? That British director who made all those films with Harold Pinter?" Yeah, "that" Joseph Losey. This was his first film. And he was American, being born in La Crosse, Wisconsin. As for his reputation for being British, it's much the same story as for "French director" Jules Dassin (born in Middleton, Connecticut). The confusion comes because these American directors started their careers right before the 1950's. Blame the confusion—all of it—on Joseph McCarthy (and put his minion, Roy Cohn, as an asterisk). Losey (and Dassin) were caught up in the Communist hunt in the 1950's and left America to work—and wait for things to calm down and the industry "black-list" to be officially/unofficially ignored. As for The Boy With Green Hair, it's not a bad start for a first film; I've been working on a post for one of Fred Zinnemann's early films, My Brother Talks to Horses, which is just plain weird, but one has to start somewhere.
There was a boy
A very strange, enchanted boy
They say he wandered very far
Very far, over land and sea
A little shy and sad of eye
But very wise was he
"Nature Boy" words and music by eden ahbez
Police find a silent and bald child (Dean Stockwell—he was 12) wandering the streets and bring him, calling on Dr. Evans (Robert Ryan) to find out what the situation is. Through coaxing—and some food—Evans learns that the boy's name is Peter Frye, that his parents are missing and have been since travelling to London during the second World War. The small Frye has been traded from relative to relative until being taken in by Gramps (Pat O'Brien), a retired vaudevillian who, it turns out, is not really his grandfather. Despite the lack of blood-ties, Peter found a stable life with the old man, who is genial and caring and has a boy's sense of play and wonder.
Peter has settled enough to be regularly attending a school, with its clique-mindedness and "new-kid" insecurities, and though he makes friends, there's also others who make school-life testing beyond what might be on a page. Much is made that Frye doesn't have any parents—any "real" parents, like a "normal" kid would have—and it becomes apparent (once others bring it up) that he might be considered a war orphan (as his class is setting up a collection at school for the European kid-survivors. This gets to young Peter and more and more, his thoughts turn to the war and its consequences on people...people like him. It doesn't help that there is much in the news about civil defense and the escalating tensions of nuclear proliferation. "Duck and Cover" sounds like a good idea until the shock-wave comes along. It puts a lot on Peter's mind about the consequences of the last war and the likely next one.
So, imagine the kid's surprise when he wakes up from one troubled night's sleep with GREEN hair! At first, he thinks it's funny—what a goofy thing to have green hair. Gramps is alarmed, but goes along with it. But, the kids at school—they consider Peter a freak and begin to regularly haze him and try to cut his hair off—him with his pacifist ideas and all. The fascists! And if they weren't bad enough, the parents are equally aghast. A BOY with green hair! What WILL happen to the neighborhood? And despite being a good-natured soul, Gramps feels the public pressure about this kid that stands out, and Gramps takes him to the barber to get his head completely shaved. A crew-cut wouldn't be good enough, not even in the 1950's.
A vision of European war-orphans explain it all to Peter.
It's a bit precious and more heavy-handed than it needs to be, especially with the intended audience of kids (hopefully accompanied by their intolerant parents, but—I dunno, I'll bet the folks just dropped the kids off and with any luck, picked them up later) and all the folks blarney provided by O'Brien. Ryan makes a tolerant father-figure, and Stockwell is everything you'd want in a child's performance—nothing mawkish or mugging (he seems more adults than a lot of the movie's adults). But whether the plot actually convinces that tolerance—in the midst of possible nuclear annihilation—is anything more than a good idea, especially considering the actions of the adults in the movie, I'm not sure. It feels like just a verification of kid-victimhood, without any recourse for rescue. And I don't think kid's "get" allegory.
One other interesting aspect of the film is its score—by Leigh Harline—making extensive use of one of the Summer of '48's music hits, "Nature Boy," a strange and haunting song that almost literally fell into Nat King Cole's lap. It lends the movie a touch of the exotic that makes it a bit more credible...and heartfelt.
American Madness(Frank Capra, 1932) As contemporary a movie as they come, taking on The Great Depression, "bank-runs" and "the only thing to fear" being fear in this pre-Code film, originally begun as a project for Alan Dwan but ending up in the capable hands of Francesco Rosario Capra, All-American immigrant. Thing is, when Capra is on point, his films aren't just "contemporary," they're "for the ages," and American Madness speaks for today, just as it did for 1932, only the subject may not be about bank-runs, but about ignorance. Here's the story: It's a rough day for bank manager Tom Dickson (Walter Huston—father of John and grandfather of Anjelica, Tony, and Danny): He's got a meeting with the bank's board and they have blood in their eyes. They feel the bank is losing money and they want to merge with a local Trust and have Dickson resign. It seems he's a bit too "liberal" with the bank loans going out to the bank's patrons, trying to get on their feet after losing jobs, or trying to start a business or avoid losing the farm. He needs to be a bit more "conservative" with the loans, stop taking risks with the bank's money—after all, look at what they've done to earn it. Dickson is of the opinion that money isn't worth anything until you DO something with it, build something, make the money work—only in that way will they be able to combat the stagnation of The Great Depression.*So, yeah, he'll give loans out to farmers and local grocers and merchants, as well as to friends of the board.
Because it's the little guy that makes an economy work. Prosperity starts from the bottom up, not from trickling down. *Ahem* Speaking of the bottom...
The film begins with a ritual: the tellers are the first to arrive and in the dimness of the closed bank, go to the vault, open it and retrieve the trays of cash that they will use in their transactions. They joke, spar, and throw small-talk at each other. Prominent among them is Chief Teller Matt Brown (Pat O'Brien), who has been given a break by Dickson; Brown is an ex-con who got a bad break, but Dickson is giving him a chance to make a life for himself, a responsibility he takes extremely seriously and with a fierce loyalty to the bank and to Dickson personally. This puts him in conflict with a loan manager Cyril Cluett (Gavin Gordon), who's a bit of a blowhard and a guy who plays fast and loose with the rules, including flirting with Dickson's wife (Kay Johnson), who likes the attention, feeling somewhat neglected by her husband and his focus on business (the man even forgot their anniversary, for pity's sake!).
But Cluett is such a snake that one of his clients is a local mob-boss, and to get on the guy's good side and to avoid blackmail, he gives him entree to the bank. The crook is going to stage a bank robbery and Cluett gives him access. The bank-robbery does not go well. Yeah, the crooks make off with some cash, but in the attempt, a security guard is killed. Suspicions run to the guy with the keys, the Chief Teller, who is questioned by the police, but obstinately won't revel his whereabouts on the night of the robbery; there's a good reason for keeping silent—he tracked Dickson's wife to the apartment of Cluett, where he found them getting ready to have an after-play drink. Brown, out of loyalty to his boss, will not reveal what he knows, even if it points suspicions right at him, with his criminal record.
Dickson, however, has his hands full. News of the robbery turns to rumors throughout the city—the further afield it gets from the source, the further afield it gets from the truth, ie. the bank is insolvent due to the robbery and Dickson was the one who made off with the money. In a panic, the depositors start a run on the bank to withdraw their funds, so they can get their money out before everybody else and the bank runs out of money.
So, the bank starts filling up with panicked people wanting to get their money, out of the assumption that the bank is becoming insolvent and they'll lose everything. Meanwhile, the police are questioning Brown, who won't tell them his whereabouts on the night of the robbery because it will reveal the betrayal by Dickson's wife. The bank's board, further emboldened by this turn of events, wants Dickson out...now. Dickson implores Brown to tell him what happened, so that he can start to put an end to the mess, but Brown is adamant. He won't tell him where he was that night, lest he learn about the indiscretion of his wife.
"Ya trust ME, don't ya, Matt?"
For me, American Madness is emblematic of how Americans process information—that is, "badly." Even in this 24-hour news-cycle (but maybe, BECAUSE OF the 24 hour news-cycle), we colonists have a tendency to get things wrong and never get them right. Usually, in any big news story, there is a window of opportunity—a vacuum, if you will—that needs to be filled with information, good, bad, or...well, that's just it, it's going to be either good or bad, right or wrong. When news "breaks," unless somebody fixes it, in rushes questionable facts, speculation, ephemeral arcana, historical precedence, more speculation, and more questionable facts. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum (and there usually are an infinity of ads, as you have have to pay for this crap) until someone can say "what we know so far..." Time allows verification and verification gels fact.
In the meantime, however, everything that has gone before has implanted itself in the conscious or unconscious mind of the viewer, and, if they switch off without the verification, they may be left with the impression that the Martians are attacking Grover's Mill. Now, Martian have never attacked Grover's Mill, but more recent examples of major events are rife with speculation in the infancy of their reporting that is parroted back, mis-read, or mis-interpreted in the vacuum of facts that suck in the questionable first few minutes of confusion.
But, without the benefit of time or hindsight, verification, or refutation, or even the inability to accept facts and change one's opinion, that questionable information hardens into facts (although they are merely opinions, as they have no basis in fact) and the holders of those misbegotten ideas are merely looking for their own verification to shore up the opinions.
Rather hysterical publicity photo of Walter Huston holding off panicking bank customers with pistols.
So, let's face facts. In this electronic age—no one is facing facts. Or even recognizing them as facts. Thanks to the glut of information available to us—from the 24 hour news cycle and the internet—we have both the most informed and uninformed electorate simultaneously. One may take comfort in the Lincoln bromide "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time..." but only if you stay away from German history. Steven Colbert famously called the phenomenon "Truthiness" as in "my gut is more informed than my brain." I take the word from the song "Zippity-Doo-Da" and call it being "satis-factual," only holding those truths that make you happy. And that's the way it is, Tuesday November 8—Election Day. And that's American Madness.
* The story is based on the principles of Amadeo Giannini, who started the Bank of Italy in San Francisco in 1904. He was the son of immigrant parents and he adapted a radical concept, giving loans to the middle-class, rather than the upper-crust, basing his decisions on character rather than cronyism. One of his loans was to a young Harry Cohn, who started a movie studio called Columbia Pictures that made American Madness. Now, before you can say that the guy was "WRONG-G-G" and "a LOSER," let me just say that Giannini did NOT go out of business, but he DID change the institution's name...to "Bank of America." You might have heard of them.
