The New Pictures

The Boy With Green Hair (RKO Radio) is a "message" movie, dolled up. RKO's new boss Howard Hughes, who would rather gamble on low necklines than on lofty messages, inherited the picture from the Dore Schary regime, spent thousands fiddling with it, and ended up by reluctantly releasing the original.

Green Hair falls short not because it hasan idea but because it has one too many (it tries to preach against both war and intolerance), and because it labors so clumsily to 'cram its ideas into the mold of "entertainment." As a result, the message seems as contrived and insincere as a singing commercial, and just about as entertaining.

The story is a heavy-footed fantasy about a war orphan (Dean Stockwell) adopted by a singing waiter (Pat O'Brien). Overnight, the boy's hair turns green (in Technicolor). He is a symbol of the tragedy that war inflicts on children. But townspeople grow intolerant of the boy because his green hair makes him "different." ("How would you like your sister to marry someone with green hair?")

Having thus stated its double-feature message, the film even contrives an ending in a happy, hopeful vein. At no point does it give its central anti-war theme the emotional contagion that the same message got in The Search or the Italian-made Shoeshine, both of which dealt movingly with war's impact on children by simply telling a straight story honestly.

The Dark Past (Columbia) is a study of a vicious young killer (William Holden) who is as afraid of his own twisted dreams as he is of the law. When he escapes from prison and holes up with his pals in the weekend cottage of a shrewd psychiatrist (Lee J. Cobb), he finally learns from the doctor--too late--that an Oedipus complex has helped to give him a killer's warped personality.

A swift and sometimes brutal melodrama, The Dark Past makes a frank plea for sympathetic understanding, rather than harsh punishment, of young criminals. Smooth performances by Holden and Cobb put the point across without undue sentimentality.

Originally a play, and once before produced as a movie,* the new version of the story resembles a photographed stage show. Most of the action takes place on a single set, and the chief plot development takes place in the gunman's mind. Director Rudolph Mate (famed as a cameraman for such pictures as Carl Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, Rene Glair's The Last Millionaire, Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent) keeps his camera on the move through the rooms of Cobb's cottage, and occasionally overcomes the static effect. But the picture loses sight of the fact that all the intimate details of a psychoanalysis are apt to be more interesting to the patient and the doctor than to a kibitzer.

That Wonderful Urge (20th Century-Fox) is a stale, wearisome slapstick sermon on the text "You, Too, Can Be Happy, Though Rich." The example is a tabloid reporter (Tyrone Power) who writes scurrilous stories about a chain-store heiress (Gene Tierney). Disguised as a playboy-author, he pursues her to Sun Valley, and she develops an odd urge to share more of her time--and maybe her millions--with him. To most reporters, this might seem like very sweet vengeance, if you can get it; to Reporter Power, the whole idea is repugnant.

When his $50 million baby discovers who he really is, she decides to dose him with his own poison--lurid publicity--and issues a fake announcement of their marriage. His paper fires him, of course, and for the next few reels, editors, lawyers and even the handsome young couple energetically worry the question: Did the nice newsman really marry the naughty rich girl, or didn't he? As all the din begins to fade, the answer seems to be: he didn't, but he will.

Force of Evil (Enterprise; MGM) takes a long, unfavorable look at the numbers racket. Notoriously unprofitable for suckers, the racket also turns out to be unrewarding dramatically. A tough young shyster (John Garfield) gets himself neck-deep in crooked shenanigans. When he tries to repay his older and more honest brother (Thomas Gomez) for past favors, he only succeeds in getting the brother caught in the middle of a gang war. To prove fairly conclusively that the racket doesn't really pay, Garfield's passion for a pretty secretary (Beatrice Pearson) comes to a very bad end, and his chief client and business partner eventually gets done in.

Force of Evil, based on Ira Wolfert's novel Tucker's People, takes too long to say too little, and it uses too much high-flown language in dealing with its lowbrow characters. Unable to keep the story alive with dialogue and camera, Director-Scenarist Abraham Polonsky sometimes puts his star on the sound track as narrator. This leads to some confusion: Has the novel been made into a movie, or is it just being read aloud, with a pictorial background?

Garfield and Polonsky, who worked together on the successful Body and Soul, deal with an awesome quota of evil in Force of Evil, but the lame techniques that are tried in the film take away most of its force.

* The James Warwick play opened on Broadway in 1935, ran for 119 performances, was later revived. The 1939 Columbia movie starred Chester Morris and Ralph Bellamy.

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