The movie opens with a little bald boy in a police station who refuses to speak until he is, finally, coaxed to tell his story to a psychologist. Peter is a 12-year-old old war orphan, shuttled from relative to relative, who finally ends up living with his ‘Gramp’ in a small town. He doesn’t know his parents are dead. Gramp is a former vaudevillian who now works as a singing waiter. He is waiting for the boy to trust him before he tells him about his parents, but Peter finds out the truth when one of his school friends compares him to a war orphan on a poster and tells him he’s one of them. Upset by the news but pretending he already knows, Peter goes home to Gramp, who comforts him. The next day, the boy wakes up with bright green hair. Gramp takes him to see a doctor, who is stumped for an answer. Peter rejects the idea of shaving off his hair or dyeing it. The townspeople and Peter’s school friends are hostile to the little boy. He is ridiculed and made miserable. He runs away to the nearby woods and, in a moving fantasy scene involving the war orphans seen on the posters, he comes to learn why he got his green hair and what his purpose is – to teach adults how hostility can provoke wars and how hard war is on children.

The gentle message of the film – that people who are different are not to be blamed or mistreated – still resonates today but it had particular importance at the time when the film was released, a time of widespread racial discrimination in a post-world war country. The anti-war sentiment blends with the plea for tolerance. Stockwell turns in a fine performance as the child. O’Brien also gives a standout performance. Producer Stephen Ames was a major stockholder in Technicolor and the production was able to get 35 mm stock at a discount. The film cost less than $1 million. Unfortunately, it bombed.

On December 6, 1948, Life magazine ran an article about how the studio that made the movie, RKO, was taken over by Howard Hughes (“the millionaire playboy and plane designer“) just as production was completed. It read “Hughes hates messages – his pictures have always been concerned with simple and fundamental things like death (Hell’s Angels), crime (Scarface), and sex (The Outlaws). A crew of skilled technicians was turned loose with orders to blast the message out of The Boy with Green Hair. They reshot some scenes and rewrote much dialogue, but after spending thousands of dollars (no one will say how many) the results were dispiriting. Finally, Hughes agreed to go back to the original version, and that is what moviegoers will see on the screen when it is released.” The dollar amount was said to be $150,000. Dore Schary, RKO’s president of production, quit the studio after Hughes meddled with his films.

Barzmen would later say, “Joe shot the picture in such a way that there wasn’t much possibility for change. A few lines were stuck in here and there to soften the message, but that was about it.” He also recalled that Hughes called Stockwell into his office and told him what to say when other children spoke about the war: “And that’s why America has gotta have the biggest army, and the biggest navy, and the biggest air force in the world!” Little Stockwell politely said, “No, sir” to his boss even after Hughes screamed at him.

Losey spoke about Hughes’ efforts to purge the communist sympathizers from his studio in “Losey on Losey”, edited by Tom Milne, “I was offered a film called I Married a Communist, which I turned down categorically. I later learned that it was a touchstone for establishing who was a ‘red’: you offered I Married a Communist to anybody you thought was a Communist, and if they turned it down, they were.”

In a 1995 interview featured on a Stockwell fansite, Stockwell had this to say about his performance. “ … just that there was another of those damned crying scenes! That was basically all I was concerned about, I always found that a difficult experience to have to do.” Losey would say later that he was “deliberately cruel” to Stockwell to get him to cry on cue, talking about the death of a pet kitten.

Losey had green wigs created for Stockwell. He didn’t want the child to dye his hair or shave it off. Stockwell explains in the aforementioned interview, “It was a wig. There were several of them, and they were very expensive. They were made from French women’s hair and a couple of them were made so they could shave the hair off. They were a huge pain in the ass and I really didn’t like it.”

He continues, “But I did like doing the movie for the reason that I thought it was an important movie. We had been involved in the Second World War which had just ended a few years before this. I had been very aware of the experience of the war from the newspapers and newsreels and everyone’s conversations, the consciousness of it all through my childhood, so I felt this was making an important statement because it was an anti-war film. And that’s why a lot of the participants were branded Communists and put on the Hollywood blacklist. That included the director Joseph Losey, the producer Adrian Scott and the writer, it screwed up a lot of lives. It was really horrible. But during the production, I did feel that I was part of something that meant something to me, it was important.”

The song “Nature Boy,” the only one composed by Eden Ahbez (he preferred the lower case eden ahbez in his credit, for religious reasons), is sung over the opening credits and is the underscore throughout the movie. The song cost RKO $10,000. Golden Globe Special Award Winner Nat King Cole’s version had made it famous the previous year.

The film was restored with funding from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in partnership with The Film Foundation.