Joseph Losey

[tolbs1010]

Hideo Nakata's documentary, Joseph Losey: The Man With Four Names, is now on YouTube. Have been wanting to see this for quite a long time but was never able to find it anywhere.

[Matt]

The Boy with Green Hair: Typical Dore Schary vague and muddled "message" film, further hamstrung by meddling from RKO's new owner Howard Hughes. Originally intended as an anti-racism allegory, it becomes something about how it's sad that war orphans exist and how there really ought to be no more war.

I remember watching this as a teenager (on American Movie Classics—the channel that eventually devolved into AMC) in black and white. I thought it was pretty stupid overall, but especially that they would make a black and white movie about a boy with green hair. Well, it was actually filmed in 3-strip Technicolor and apparently done so on the cheap because uncredited (and soon to be blacklisted) producer Adrian Scott was an investor in Technicolor and could get a discount. This WAC Blu-ray is a 4K scan of the original 3-strip negatives. It looks a little soft and somewhat rough around the edges in spots (almost certainly due to RKO's cost-cutting and indifference to film preservation, not to WAC's transfer) but is overall fine, nothing to get too worked up over.

It's a bad movie, but Dean Stockwell (already a veteran actor at the age of 12) gives a heartfelt performance that would be touching if the movie around him wasn't so eye-rollingly cornball. Fellow child-actors-with-long-careers William Smith, Dwayne Hickman, and Russ Tamblyn appear as well. I'm glad I paid less than $10 for it.

[Blip Martindale]

The Boy with Green Hair: Typical Dore Schary vague and muddled "message" film, further hamstrung by meddling from RKO's new owner Howard Hughes. Originally intended as an anti-racism allegory, it becomes something about how it's sad that war orphans exist and how there really ought to be no more war.

I remember watching this as a teenager (on American Movie Classics—the channel that eventually devolved into AMC) in black and white. I thought it was pretty stupid overall, but especially that they would make a black and white movie about a boy with green hair. Well, it was actually filmed in 3-strip Technicolor and apparently done so on the cheap because uncredited (and soon to be blacklisted) producer Adrian Scott was an investor in Technicolor and could get a discount. This WAC Blu-ray is a 4K scan of the original 3-strip negatives. It looks a little soft and somewhat rough around the edges in spots (almost certainly due to RKO's cost-cutting and indifference to film preservation, not to WAC's transfer) but is overall fine, nothing to get too worked up over.

It's a bad movie, but Dean Stockwell (already a veteran actor at the age of 12) gives a heartfelt performance that would be touching if the movie around him wasn't so eye-rollingly cornball. Fellow child-actors-with-long-careers William Smith, Dwayne Hickman, and Russ Tamblyn appear as well. I'm glad I paid less than $10 for it.

I've still never seen this but it looms large in my personal filmatist education. Circa 2005 I was working in a video store in Seattle, and a regular, dreaded, customer was a university film professor who was hilariously flamboyant and bitchy and ALWAYS blatantly chickenhawking all of the male clerks, most of us students. He rented this film literally once a week, and would go on for unnecessary minutes at a time about how much he loved Dean Stockwell, every time he took it out. I don't think ANY of our staff ever watched the thing, the prof's sales pitch could have used a bit less targeted finesse.

[domino harvey]

I can understand the negative reactions to the Boy With Green Hair, as pretty much nothing it attempts after the first act is all that successful. But I thought the first 30 minutes or so of this were terrifically enchanting and peculiar in that exact way that instantly explains why the film was so beloved by certain strains of French film critic. But much of the goodwill is undone by the sloppy unfocused moralizing of the actual inciting action, which is never really explored with anything but cursory Sunday School lessons. I still land on a marginal thumbs up for both the wind up and the audacity of the pitch, though

Much less defensible for me was the dreadful Figures in a Landscape, which sounds more radical in description than in reality. Robert Shaw gives a performance equal to his screenplay, which is to say bad, and Malcolm McDowell, smack between If… and A Clockwork Orange, isn’t much better but at least he doesn’t keep effeminately cackling like Shaw. A two-hander like this is fucking doooooooooomed when you hate both hands. There’s also surprisingly none of Losey’s usual visual wit, and the film makes a fatal error by giving us POV shots from within the roving black helicopter, ruining what little mystery there is here (a lack of motivating details and cryptic hints at the specifics don’t actually result in anything at all). A film that sounds audacious only until you actually see it

[tolbs1010]

If Losey made a worse film than Secret Ceremony, I haven’t seen it. And I have seen almost all of them, outside a couple of his 50’s films and Roads To The South (which is impossible to find). I watched this for a 3rd time in an attempt to find something redeeming or interesting about it. It actually gets worse with repeat viewings. It’s based on an award-winning novella so maybe there is a worthwhile psychodrama somewhere in the material, but George Tabori’s script doesn’t find it. Visually, it is well below Losey’s and Gerry Fisher’s usual high standards, despite the unique visual possibilities offered by the Debenham House location. Perhaps it is somewhat due to Kino’s transfer, but the lighting looks exceptionally poor for a DP of Fisher's pedigree. There is also a regular shakiness to the camera work that doesn't seem to be intentional. The lack of visual flow in the compositions and the turgid symbolism of the imagery are all on Losey.

Taylor is AWFUL in the lead role. Not even in an enjoyably funny way, like in Boom!, where her over-the-top muddle of a performance actually serves the character and story. In this one, she tries and fails to look pensive to suggest inner life in the quieter scenes and then does her typical teeth-baring routine in the louder scenes. There are attempts at a British way of speaking that come and go. Her best scene is watching her scarf down an English breakfast and capping it with a belch. Farrow fares better as the mysterious, abused woman-child. She fully commits to the role even when asked to play some very cringey scenes. Mitchum looks embarrassed to be there. Who can blame him when having to deliver lines like “…so bloody proud of her breasts. Those fantastic opulent Mother of Pearlie globes” or “You look more like a cow than my late wife. No offense, I’m rather fond of cows. Mooo!”. He’s the only one that seems to understand how stupid the material is and, as such, brings a welcome bit of comedy to his line readings.

Of the two Taylor/Losey collaborations, this is the one that deserves scorn and mockery, not Boom!.

[JSC]

Personally, I like the film. It actually follows Marco Denevi's original novella pretty closely. But I've never known
the film not to get reactions from both extreme ends of the spectrum.

[crimlaw]

I would watch Mitchum in anything, especially this, his most unusual role.

[beamish14]

Boom is a genuinely great film. Secret Ceremony I recall being mostly slow and just not engaging the way virtually every other Losey film I’ve seen is

I was fortunate to see The Prowler for the first time ever at Noir City 2025 from UCLA/The Film Noir Foundation’s beautiful restoration. Few movies make Southern California look like such a horrible hellscape as that one

[tolbs1010]

Boom is a genuinely great film.

Yes! It is often described as 'campy', which doesn't do it justice. The character of Sissy Goforth is supposed to be bonkers and out of touch. The comedy in the film is intentional and inherent in the source material.

The Prowler is my favorite of Losey's pre-blacklist films. I also saw it on the big screen at UCLA many many years ago in a film class. The final image

Spoiler

of Heflin (outstanding) climbing a hill in the desert only to be shot and come tumbling back down is Losey at his best. Encapsulates the film's themes and Losey's own bleak view of the American dream.

Almodóvar must be a fan as well. It is playing on TV in a scene in Kika

[domino harvey]

It is so wild to me that the most wildly right wing French film critics, the Mac-Mahonists, singled out Losey as one of their Four Aces solely on the strength of his first three films and that one of those films is easily the most left wing film to come out of Hollywood at the time. Cognitive dissonance is incredible! I caught up with the Lawless today and didn’t like it much, though some of the worst things about it may not register for a French viewer (namely, the performances). Anything I enjoyed here was done better by (fellow Ace) Lang almost fifteen years prior in Fury, though I do award some minor points for resisting the urge to paint everyone in the town as a violent bigot. Still, imagine watching this and thinking it’s one of the pinnacles of film as art… and I say this as someone who according to Letterboxd has already seen over 80% of the movies that played in the Mac-Mahon theatre during the fifties and sixties (and almost all of the rest were already on my radar/queue). These are ostensibly my people!

[tolbs1010]

Yes, it's hard to understand what got these critics so excited about The Lawless. It's definitely the weakest of the 5 films Losey made in Hollywood. A simplistic message picture made on a shoestring with a very pedestrian script and some of the most wooden acting you'll ever see. Is there a less charismatic lead actor than Macdonald Carey? He turns up again in Losey's These Are The Damned, but at least we get full ham Oliver Reed to offset him in that one.

The Prowler is the only great one of the 5 Hollywood films. Losey clearly thought that one was best, as he took a print with him across the pond after being blacklisted to show producers in an attempt to find work. His remake of M was a job that he took reluctantly, knowing that remaking an already great film is lunacy. The police procedural aspects of the script bog it down, but It has some excellent location photography and a remarkable lead performance by David Wayne. His monologue near the end of the film is startling in its rawness. It's hard to believe it's the same actor that provided such skilled supporting comedy in Adam's Rib in the same year.

The Boy With Green Hair and The Big Night are oddball curios that are not altogether successful. They're both memorable, though, and the former is an inexplicable favorite for some people. The Mac-Mahonists among them, apparently. Losey was instrumental in coaxing good performances out of a very young Dean Stockwell and a very insecure John Barrymore Jr in those films.

the Mac-Mahonists, singled out Losey as one of their Four Aces solely on the strength of his first three films and that one of those films is easily the most left wing film to come out of Hollywood at the time. Cognitive dissonance is incredible!

Losey may have been a self-professed leftist, but his best work reveals an intriguing fusion of affinity and acidity towards wealth and the wealthy, perhaps weighing more heavily on the affinity side than he would ever admit. You point out in the Cahiers thread that this particular group of critics stopped championing Losey right when he started doing his best work, which is crazy or petty or both. Cognitive dissonance and contradictions abound with filmmakers and critics alike.