The Boy with Green Hair (1948) on Netflix
Orphaned Peter Fry is taken in by a retired actor he calls Gramp. Taunted at school for having no parents, Peter wakes one morning to find his hair has turned green.
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- Rotten Tomatoes80%
Trailer
Plot summary
Peter Fry is a war orphan. After moving between aunts and uncles who neglect him, he goes to live with Gramp, a retired actor who takes an understanding interest in him. Peter starts at a new school and settles into the life of an ordinary boy, and his class joins the effort to help war orphans abroad. The posters of those children stay with him. He grows serious, and he hears the grown-ups around him discussing the prospect of another war. The morning after a bath, drying his hair with a towel, he is astonished to see that it has turned green.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Boy with Green Hair (1948)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Shooting was put on hold shortly after executive producer Dore Schary hired Joseph Losey in 1947, when RKO production manager Adrian Scott was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
- RKO owner Howard Hughes demanded The Boy with Green Hair be re-edited to tone down its left-wing themes and had extra footage shot without director Joseph Losey, but RKO vice-president Ned Depinet reversed the changes after seeing the revised cut.
- The film began as Betzi Beaton's 1946 short story in The Week, which Joseph Losey said was a fantasy about racial discrimination before it was rewritten as an anti-war allegory with the message that war always damages children.
- Losey wanted a dream-like transformation between the town scenes and the forest glade where the war orphans appear, copying the black-and-white to color switch in Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz, but RKO refused to pay for the effect.
- Edward James Olmos, a fan of Dean Stockwell's earlier film, packed his 2009 Battlestar Galactica: The Plan with references to it and had a replica of Peter's costume made for a war orphan named John, but the studio refused his wish to give John green hair.
- The political controversy around the film fed into Joseph Losey's career change; he went from a Hollywood director to an expatriate one, fleeing to England in 1951 when he became a target for investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
