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Technicolor America in the RKO backlot, the first of Joseph Losey's laboratory experiments: "I like long stories that are hard to believe," assures the psychiatrist (Robert Ryan) at the police station, certainly a more attentive audience than most critics at the time. The boy (Dean Stockwell) is first seen as a bald runaway encircled by confused adults, his head a smooth oval but for a pair of piercing eyes. His is the tale told to the camera, bounced from one relative to another until sheltered by the Irish vaudevillian (Pat O'Brien), the solitude and hostility of the war orphan. One morning his curly brown mop turns "the color of spring, of hope," as simple as that. Shock yields to purpose, a message ("The world doesn't have to be blown up") unheard by locals who see only the bearer's hair color. Deleuze's enfant quelconque by way of Dore Schary, bracingly peculiar in its allegorical provocations: When the tiny messiah is sheared at the barbershop before a pained community, each verdant lock falls on the floor with the weight of betrayal. The tableaux of poster-youngsters that gives way to a mob of classmates wielding scissors, the ominous off-screen whoosh that unsettles a cozy composition, the oneiric musical number that leaves its mark on Dr. Seuss. (Ann Carter's telling cameo points up the kinship to Curse of the Cat People.) Losey's These Are the Damned has children's cries echoing through an atomic haze, though the elucidating link is really to Leo carrying meaning from side to side in The Go-Between, the perilous life of a symbol. With Barbara Hale, Richard Lyon, Walter Catlett, Samuel S. Hinds, and Regis Toomey.
--- Fernando F. Croce |