The Boy With Green Hair

Next up on the list of movies that's been on my DVR and that is about to get another airing on TCM is The Boy With Green Hair. Its next airing is tomorrow, November 8, at 3:30 PM. With that in mind, I made the point as usual of watching it so that I could do the post here just in time for the airing.

The movie starts off at a police station, where a bald boy has been found, claiming to have a story nobody will believe, which is why the authorities have brought in a child psychologist, Dr. Evans (Robert Ryan in a small role) to try to get the kid named Peter (Dean Stockwell) to talk. Once again, as you might guess, this is going to lead to a flashback as to why the kid has no hair and why he's run away.

Peter is an orphan who has been shuttled around from one aunt and uncle to another; who knows how many of them he has. But for whatever reason, none of them were able to take care of him, so he wound up in the care of one last relative, Gramp (Pat O'Brian). Gramp -- if he even is the kid's real grandfather although that ultimately doesn't matter to the plot -- is a retired actor now living out his days in a small town. It's the years just following World War II, when people are afraid of the new atomic bomb. Peter, as an orphan, doesn't fit in in his new home, getting teased by the kids and nearly panicking when he overhears some of the adults talking about the threat of war.

Gramp tries to soothe Peter by telling him that there's a surprise awaiting Peter the next morning. Peter does get a surprise, but it's not what Gramp might have had planned. Peter takes a bath the next morning, and as he's drying off his hair, takes the towel off to discover -- he has green hair! Well, duh, how do you think the movie got its title. Needless to say, this is a shock for him, and the question of how his hair suddenly turned green is a reasonable one. So Gramp takes Peter to the doctor, who is unable to determine any reason from the medicine he knows why Peter's hair should have turned green. The adults are shocked, although one girl at least claims it's super.

That is, until word spreads around among the adults. Some of them think that perhaps he got it from the milk he drinks, which makes no sense because wouldn't other people have green hair too then? Perhaps it's a disease, but one that's contagious. So pretty soon, nobody wants to be around Peter for fear they too might wind up with the same green hair. Peter, as a result, runs away from Gramp and into the forest, where he comes upon a Brigadoon-like place. Except that this place is inhabited by children who are all war orphans like Peter. They tell him that he's been given the green hair so that perhaps people will pay attention to him as he tells them how bad war is.

Nope, not going to work. Frankly, now that Peter has a message he's insufferable as well as being a misfit, which leads him to make the difficult decision to shave off his hair in the fact that it will grow back in its original color. Of course, we knew this was going to happen or else how would have little Peter have been found the way he is at the beginning of the movie.

If there's a problem with The Boy With Green Hair, it's that the message is nothing if not unsubtle. We get the point already. Perhaps the reason for this is that it's based on a short story, in which case trying to draw it out to feature length might have caused the problems. It doesn't help that the characters aren't the most appealing. Robert Ryan has nothing to do, so any of the movie's problems aren't his fault. Dean Stockwell is being asked to play a kid who has good reason to be morose and run away, so it's not really his fault either. Pat O'Brien goes for the Barry Fitzgerald Irish shtick at times, which comes across here as mildly obnoxious. And of course most of the rest of the characters are being asked to be mean to this poor kid.

It's not so much that The Boy With Green Hair is a bad movie, however, as much as it is material that it can be a bit hard to make palatable. So definitely watch and judge for yourself on this one.

Sometimes Green

Musicals not being my favorite genre, I haven't recorded all that many of the movies Dave Karger has presented in the Saturday Musical Matinee slot. One that showed up a while back that sounded interesting and that I did record was a British musical from the interwar years: Evergreen.

Jessie Matthews stars as Harriet Green, a stage star in the revue era of musical shows in Edwardian England. As the movie opens, however, she's about to leave the stage as she's getting married to the Marquis of Staines. However, at the farewell party the night before the wedding, she's approached by her dresser, Mrs. Hawkes, who whispers something horrible into her ear. That something is revealed when she gets home and finds the long-lost Treadwell has returned. Treadwell was never Harriet's husband, but he is the father of the girl that Harriet has kept hidden away from both Treadwell and the public. And now that he's back and has seen the news of Harriet's upcoming marriage, he plans to blackmail poor Harriet. Harriet responds by leaving for her native South Africa and leaving Hawkes enough money to raise the little girl away from Treadwell.

Fast forward a bunch of years: the movie implies around 30, but the adult daughter doesn't seem old enough for that. We learn that Harriet died in obscurity in South Africa and, considering the way the plot runs, news never reached England. The young girl, also named Harriet but taking the name Hawkes, is all grown up and never knew her biologial mother. She's got some musical and dance talent, but with a depression on, she finding it hard to break in to the London stage scene. That is, until one day when she's hoping to get a job and who should show up but Harriet's old understudy Maudie (Betty Balfour), who immediately notices an uncanny resemblance between this young woman and the old Harriet Green, who would be about sixty by now. Of course, since the young Harriet is also played by Jessie Matthews, it's no wonder there's a similarity.

Maudie and a young man, Thompson (Barry MacKay) take Harriet to producer Leslie Benn (Sonnie Hale), who produced Harriet's shows back in the day and also sees the resemblance. So all of them come up with the patently ridiculous idea to pass the young Harriet off as Harriet Green the original, and that she has miraculously not aged a day even though she's 60. This is bound to cause a sensation, and bring all sorts of publicity which is in one way just what all of them need since with the economy being so tough, free publicity is worth it.

However, the publicity and fame also cause problems. At a press conference, the old Marquis of Staines shows up and eventually recognizes Thompson... as Harriet's son, which of course Thompson isn't. In fact, he's fallen in love with young Harriet and now can't do anything about that because the public would find out and the ruse about this being the original Harriet Green would be up. And that, as the movie informs us, would be serious fraud leading to prison sentences for the fraudsters. Worse is that Treadwell shows up again and immediately resumes blackmailing Harriet and Thompson.

I've stated before that musicals aren't my favorite genre, although Evergreen works because it falls into one of the two subgenres of musicals that work better for me. One is the biographical musical, with the other being backstage musicals where the main characters are actors. There, the musical numbers tend to fit in better since they're normally set in the context of a stage musical within the movie musical. And here, the story around all of it is one that works despite being fairly ridiculous. There's also one really interesting musical number that goes back through the preceding 30 years, with the 1914 section of women being turned into munitions quite daring for the costumes and effects.

I hadn't heard of Evergreen before it showed up on TCM. But I'm glad I got the chance to see it.

The Will Rogers Story

Another movie that I have to admit I didn't realize it existed until the last time TCM ran it is The Will Rogers Story. So, when it ran on TCM, I decided to record it so that I could do a post on it here after I watched it.

The opening credits point out that this is a movie based on a story by Will Rogers' widow Betty (although she had died some years before the movie was actually made), starring Will Rogers Jr. as his father, so expect a bit of hagiography going into the film. And indeed, before we get into the actual action of the film, there's an introduction about how much stuff is named after Rogers even though he's not the sort of person you would normally expect things to be named after. So why is that the case...?

Flash back to a few years before Oklahoma became a state, so the very beginning of the 20th century. Will Rogers was the son of wealthy part-Cherokee Clem Rogers (Carl Benton Reed), but a man who didn't seem to have any good idea of what he should make of his life, to the point that he's been drifting around Texas as a sort of cowboy before he returns home to Oogalah, OK. At the train station, he meets Betty (Jane Wyman), a relative of the station master who is working at the station having recently come from Arkansas. As you can guess, they eventually get married, but in a traditional Hollywood trope, they don't hit it off at first.

Eventually they do hit it off, but by that time Will has to leave Oklahoma to make a success of himself, sending a series of postcards from all over the world as he does ranch hand work in various parts of the world before getting a job with a wild west show where he can do his horseback and lasso tricks. He returns to Oklahoma to marry Betty, except that their honeymoon, such as it is, involves him going on tour with a show for several years.

Eventually, Will winds up in the Ziegfeld Follies, and part of what he does is to provide comic relief during the intermission when the girls are changing outfits and whatnot. Will goes out on stage and provides homespun wisdom that can be interpreted in any number of ways. This really makes him famous, and gets him a career in movies as well as being introduced to pilot Wiley Post (Noah Beery Jr.), that latter being important because Rogers and Post were flying up to Alaska when they were involved in the plane crash that killed the both of them.

One thing that's interesting about The Story of Will Rogers is what doesn't get included, which is Rogers' career as an actor in talking pictures. I'd bet that was almost entirely down to the fact that those movies were made at Fox and The Story of Will Rogers was made at Warner Bros. Instead, the latter portion of the movie deals with Rogers as a foreign correspondent, followed by charity work during the Depression. There's also his realization that aviation is going to have much bigger military use, something that the higher-ups don't want to deal with after World War I.

As for the movie itself, it's entertaining enough, if most likely not overly accurate. (Clem is shown at the 1932 Democratic National Convention even though he'd been dead for 20 years by this point.) Will Jr. does a good job portraying his father, although you get the impression that's about the only role he could play considering that he didn't have much of a movie career. Jane Wyman isn't really asked to do much here but does it adequately. The movie also looks good enough with its Technicolor photography.

Battle of the Century

Because I had a post to do already today on Rock Hudson's being TCM's Star of the Month, I wanted to do a short of some sort. I had a couple from when TCM did a day of movies on the UCLA Film and TV archive, and from that I selected the Laurel and Hardy short Battle of the Century.

Information before the short begins informs us that most of this was for decades considered lost, but most of it is now extant, with a few production stills used to finish a transitional scene involving Eugene Pallette. In the first reel, Stan is a boxer and Ollie his manager/trainer. Stan seems to be going up quite a ways in terms of weight classes, but somehow his first punch manages to knock out his opponent. Except that Stan isn't bright enough to go to a neutral corner so the referee can start the 10-count. Stan later gets knocked out, meaning a very small purse for him and Ollie.

The first reel ends with the missing bit involving Pallette. Pallette is an insurance agent who sells Ollie a policy that will pay out big... if Stan gets injured. So of course, Ollie spends the second half trying to get poor Stan injured, by buying a banana and dropping the peel for Stan to slip on. Stan, unsurprisingly, doesn't slip on it, while other people do.

The climax of the movie comes when a pie maker slips on it and cream pie goes all over the place. As you can guess, this is an opportunity to have a huge pie fight, since pie fights were considered funny back in the day, and that pie fight takes up the final third or so of the short, although since it's a two-reeler that's only about six minutes of pie fighting.

Even then, I felt the pie fight went on too long. And Stan is asked to be too stupid during the boxing scene. Battle of the Century isn't terrible, but there's definitely better Laurel and Hardy stuff out there.

TCM Star of the Month November 2025: Rock Hudson

Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor in a production still from Giant (Nov. 4, 9:45 PM)

Now that we've gotten through October and are into a new month, it's once again time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time out, that star is Rock Hudson, and his movies will be airing every Tuesday night in prime time on TCM. For this tribute, the movies are grouped somewhat thematically. The first Tuesday, or tonight, sees a couple of movies that are decidedly westerns, along with Giant (9:45 PM tonight) which isn't quite a traditional western, but because of the setting involving Texas cattle and oil country, and the movie's starting some decades in the past, you can see why TCM would group it in amongst westerns.

The cast of Ice Station Zebra (Nov. 11, 10:00 PM)

Nov. 11 is Veterans' Day in the US, which TCM normally spends on military themed movies, and are indeed doing during the morning and afternoon of November 11 as well. But then, it also turns out that Rock Hudson was in enough military-themed movies that TCM could group all of those together on Veterans' Day, including Ice Station Zebra at 10:00 PM. I've got a post about another of the movies lined up for Nov. 11, although it turns out Hudson has a bit part in the movie.

Nov. 18 is mostly Rock Hudson as he was directed by Douglas Sirk, which means these aren't quite my favorite movies. However, that's not quite enough to run an entire night of films, so the night also includes A Fine Pair, which co-stars Claudia Cardinale who died not too long ago.

Rock Hudson and Doris Day in Pillow Talk (Nov. 25, 8:00 PM)

Finally, on November 25, the night kicks off with three films in which Hudson co-starred with Doris Day, starting with Pillow Talk at 8:00 PM. Then comes a movie in a similar vein albeit without Doris Day: Man's Favorite Sport? at 2:00 AM November 26, which I haven't yet seen so plan on recording.

Carney and Brown again

RKO had the popular comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey in the 1930s, at least until Robert Woolsey up and died. With tastes changing from Laurel and Hardy to Abbott and Costello, RKO decided they needed another comedy pairing of their own and came up with the bargain-basement partnership of Wally Brown and Alan Carney, as can be seen in movies like Seven Days Ashore.

Brown and Carney get top billing here, although they're really in service to the other characters. And we first see a couple of those other characaters. The movie was made smack in the middle of World War II, a time in which a bunch of men were away and women took on many roles that men had had, including the musicians in nightclub big bands. Two such women, Carol (a young Virginia Mayo) and Lucy, play in San Francisco, and also try to keep the servicemen's morale up by dancing with them. Except that both of them tell their dance partners that things can't go any further, because each of them is engaged to be married. Except that each of them, unbeknownst to the other, claims to be engaged to San Francisco scion Dan Arland Jr. (Gordon Oliver).

Dan is away because he's doing his part for the war effort by being in the merchant marine, somewhere in the middle of nowhere because the security situation tries to give the crews as little information as necessary. Dan has made a couple of friends among the crew in the form of Monty (Wally Brown) and Orval (Alan Carney), who has gotten the nickname "Handsome" for obvious reasons. The crew finds out that their next destination is actually stateside, in San Francisco, where the ship will be provisioning giving the men the titular week's leave.

This will give the crew a chance to see their families, which is of course an issue for Dan, since he's got two girlfriends. Well, technically three. Before going off to war his parents were trying to get him engaged to someone of his social class, Annabell Rogers. Officially, the engagement is broken off, but Annabelle still lives with Dan's parents because they're on her side, considering Dan a bit irresponsible. Dan worries about which of his two musician "fiancées" to tell about his presence, writing a letter to each and having only one delivered at random. Except when the other letter gets thrown away, the ship's captain finds it and, thinking that it fell out of the mailbox or something, does his good dead by posting it for delivery. So when the ship reaches shore Dan has multiple girlfriends all expecting him.

Dan tries to remedy the situation by... setting Monty and Handsome up with Carol and Lucy, lying to the women that these are fellow millionaires. Meanwhile, the women all figure out what's going on, and Annabelle decides that she's going to teach Dan a lesson. She enlists the help of Carol and Lucy in this scheme, and they're only too happy to help considering the way Dan's treated them. But it's a wartime movie, so everyone is going to come out happy in the end.

As I suggested above, Seven Days Ashore, having been made during World War II and dealing with timely war topics, is the sort of movie that was conceived as a homefront morale booster. The comedy is supposed to be gentle; also, since the movie revolves in part around a big band, there are going to be musical numbers. The only problem is, Carney and Brown are slightly more irritating than comedic, while Gordon Olvier is a drip. It's easy enough to see the studio's intentions here; it's just that those intentions don't always succeed.

Still, I always like to suggest that people judge for themselves, so once again watch Seven Days Ashore and draw your own conclusions.

Ooh, goody, another revisionist western

I've stated a bunch of times, especially when it comes to foreign films, how my taste in films differs from that of the professional movie critics. Another good example of that came when I watched one of the movies that TCM ran in honor of the late Kris Kristofferson some months back: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

Pat Garrett was shot to death in 1908, although the movie gets this slightly wrong by opening up the action with an expository scene near Las Cruces, NM, in 1909. Pat (James Coburn) is riding with some of his partners, at least until the group is ambushed and Garrett is killed, which did happen in real life. Now since this is just the opening scene and we haven't met Billy the Kid yet, it's obvious that there's going to be a flashback.

Indeed, we flash back to 1981. Billy Bonney (Kris Kristofferson) has been depredating parts of the New Mexico territory, and unsurprisingly the locals are tired of it. Garrett is about to be named sheriff of the county where Billy is based, charged with the responsibility of getting Bonney to move on or else face arrest. Billy scoffs at that idea, so once Garrett becomes sheriff, Billy is indeed arrested and faces the death penalty. Except that he's helped to escape.

Garrett goes to Santa Fe, the territorial capital, and meets with the territorial governor, Lew Wallace (Jason Robards, and yes that's the same Lew Wallace who wrote Ben-Hur) who, with some help from the rich cattleman types, put a bounty on Billy's head. Meanwhile back at Billy's hideout, he finds that there are people other than the authorities who would like him dead, and they show up at the old hideout where he and his gang used to stay where Billy went back to. They're going to try to kill him, but Billy is able to defeat them in a shootout, together with some help from a stranger named Alias (Bob Dylan, yes the singer).

The authorities learn that Billy has moved to the area where John Chisum (Barry Sullivan, and Chisum was the subject of a different Billy the Kid movie) has his cattle, so Garrett and some of the cattlemen's ring that also want Billy dead go there. The chase continues, and continues, until as we know from real life Billy is killed by Garrett, so I'm not giving away much here. It would be like saying the Japanese attack in the climax of From Here to Eternity.

As you might guess from my opening paragraph, I didn't much care for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. It's slow, filled with those pointless zooms and pans that were a thing in movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and director Sam Peckinpah uses his signature style for filming violence -- of which there's a lot in this movie. Not that I have a thing against violence, but the Peckinpah style is tediously stylized, like watching everybody overact in an old silent movie or the deaths of the people from killer bees in The Swarm.

On the other hand, critics just seem to love love love this movie for reasons I totally can't fathom. I just don't see anything in it that makes it rise above other respected westerns. But since they do love it, it's the sort of movie you're going to want to watch and judge for yourself.

Gerard Dennis

Tonight's edition of Noir Alley, coming up at midnight and on only once because of tomorrow's 24-hour programming salute to Robert Redford, is a movie that's not really a noir, but the sort of noir-adjacent crime movie that's still fairly well up Eddie Muller's alley: The Great Jewel Robber, at midnight tonight, so still late evening Saturday in more westerly time zones.

A "ripped from the headlines" pre-title sequence tells us about a man known as the "Raffles of Hollywood" among other things, a jewel robber to the stars who apparently took quite a few people for a lot of money before he was sentenced to prison. As you might guess, the movie tells us the story of this man and how he started, although at least this time I wouldn't argue that it's a flashback in the traditional sense of the word.

Gerard Dennis (David Brian) lives in a rooming house in Toronto. There's been a series of robberies of furs and jewels that have baffled the police. That is, until a man comes in to one of the police stations. Not to confess, mind you, since this isn't the thief. But to tell the police they can catch him. It turns out that this man, a Mr. Blaine, owns the house where Gerard is renting a room, and has seen the stuff Gerard is hiding. Sure enough, they go over to the house and find the goods, and when Gerard gets back that night, arrest him.

Gerard told Mr. Blaine's daughter he was in love with her and hoping to marry her, much to her father's objections. But since they're not married, Gerard isn't allowed to write letters to her, something you'd think the prison would have told him before he tried writing any letters. When he finds out they're trashing those letters, he's pissed, and plots his escape from a prison work detail. He then goes to young Miss Blaine and gets money from her for fake passports and whatnot. Except that he's been lying to her, and goes to his real girlfriend Peggy, who knows of a safe-cracking job in Buffalo.

So Gerard and Peggy make it over the border, but when it comes time to do the job, Gerard learns that Peggy and the hotel bartender who set up this job are even bigger double-crossers than Gerard is. A dispute over it leads to Gerard getting hit and suffering several broken ribs for which he spends a couple of weeks in hospital. There, he falls in love with nurse Martha (Marjorie Reynolds), marrying her after he gets out of the hospital and taking her back to New Rochelle, where she got her first nursing job back in the day. It's also a place for him to find new territory where he isn't known and where he can steal more jewels, fencing and re-setting them.

But Martha isn't pleased with his being a thief and wants him to stop. He claims he will, but once again he's lying, so she too goes to the police to get them to capture him. This time, Gerard gets on a train cross-country and goes to Hollywood. On the train, he meets Mrs. Vinson (Jacqueline de Wit), who has lost a brooch. Gerard may have stolen it, but in any case he "finds" it and returns it to Mrs. Vinson, which is more of a way for him to get an in with the Beverly Hills and Hollywood crowds who are of course loaded and offer more opportunity for jewels and furs to steal.

The plot of The Great Jewel Robber is a fairly straightforward one, and frankly feels a bit boring in writing up the synopsis. That's grossly unfair to the movie. While it's not an all-time great, it's certainly serviceable and never less than interesting. David Brian does a good job as the charming heavy, and the docudrama style of storytelling works. Modern viewers may wonder how police never seemed to catch on to Gerard, although communication between various jurisdictions wasn't quite as good back in the late 1940s.

I hadn't heard of The Great Jewel Robber before the last time it was on TCM, but I'm glad they showed it and I got the chance to watch it.

TCM's Robert Redford tribute

Robert Redford and Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (8:00 PM)

Actor-turned director Robert Redford died back in September at the age of 89. Now it's time for the TCM programming tribute, which is a 24-hour salute all day and night tomorrow, Nov. 2. The salute includes eight movies in which Redford was the star; one at the beginning of his career in which he had a small role; one in which he has what it bascially a cameo; and one movie Redford directed but did not star in. The line-up is as follows:

6:00 AM A Bridge Too Far in which Redford like a lot of people has a small role;
9:00 AM Barefoot in the Park with Redford as a lawyer newly-married to Jane Fonda;
11:00 AM Downhill Racer featuring Redford as a hot-shot skier;
1:00 PM The Candidate, starring Redford as a young Senate candidate taking on an established senator;
3:00 PM All the President's Men in which Redford and Dustin Hoffman investigate the Watergate break-in and eventually bring down Richard Nixon;
5:30 PM The Sting, reuniting Redford and Paul Newman;
8:00 PM Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid;
10:00 PM The Way We Were where Redford has a tumultuous relationship with Barbra Streisand;
12:15 AM A Riber Runs Through It, the movie Redford directed about a family in early 20th century Montana;
2:30 AM The Hot Rock, a not very good movie about a jewel robbery; and
4:30 AM War Hunt,, a Korean War film from the beginning of Redford's career

Two by Popeye

I think I mentioned some time back that I started recording the Popeye cartoons that TCM has been running in the Saturday matinee block so that I could have something short to blog about when I had a second post lined up on a day for some reason for another. Recently, I watched a pair of Popeye shorts from 1940, Wimmin Hadn't Oughta Drive and Puttin on the Act.

A couple of things about these two shorts are interesting. One is that Bluto, who had been introduced to the print comic strip back in 1932, does not appear in either short. There's also the fact that the shorts are still in black and white, even though the Fleischer brothers had made full-length shorts in color, so one would guess that they would have the contractual right to use color here. Mae Questel is also not providing the voice of Olive Oyl, this being the period of about half a dozen years where Questel was not involved before coming back.

In Wimmin Hadn't Oughta Drive, Popeye gets a new car and of course wants to show it off to Olive. She wants to learn how to drive, but Popeye, instead of teaching her, basically just lets her take the wheel. This leads to all sorts of predictable consequences, especially when you consider the old stereotype about women drivers. (I suppose back in the earliest days of cars when the engines had to be cranked and people wore goggles and overalls because of the muddy roads and topless cars, women might have less of a desire to drive, but those days were long gone by 1940.) Some of the sight gags work, although I have a feeling most people will find this short even more dated than other Popeye shorts.

Puttin on the Act involves Olive Oyl finding a newspaper headling saying that vaudeville is coming back; as you'll know from my mention of lots of 1930s movies about the performing arts, vaudeville had been dying for years. Apparently in this timeline of the Popeye universe, he and Olive had done a vaudeville double act back in the day. So they decide that they're going to restart it. This again gives the opportunity for sight gags thanks to Olive's rather elastic limbs and Popeye's use of Olive as a baton. But there's also the chance to lampoon other Hollywood types as Popeye does a series of impersonations. Those are the funniest bit of this short.

Both shorts last a shade over six minutes, and thankfully my DVR got the timing on these correct so that neither the beginning nor the ending was cut off.