The Boy With Green Hair (Joseph Losey, 1948)

Pat O'Brien and Dean Stockwell in The Boy With Green Hair 

Cast: Dean Stockwell, Pat O'Brien, Robert Ryan, Barbara Rush, Richard Lyon, Walter Catlett, Samuel S. Hinds, Regis Toomey, Charles Meredith, David Clarke, Billy Sheffield, Johnny Calkins, Teddy Infuhr, Dwayne Hickman, Eilene Janssen, Curtis Loys Jackson Jr., Charles Arnt. Screenplay: Ben Barzman, Alfred Lewis Levitt, based on a story by Betsy Beaton. Cinematography: George Barnes. Art direction: Ralph Berger, Albert S. D'Agostino. Film editing: Frank Doyle. Music: Leigh Harline.

Joseph Losey's The Boy With Green Hair has endured, mutating with the times to reflect whatever social issue dominates at the moment. When it was made in the postwar 1940s, it was intended to carry a strong antiwar statement -- one that RKO's new owner, Howard Hughes, hated so much that he tried to re-edit the film to eliminate it. Today, it might be seen as echoing some of the passion behind Black Lives Matter. In any case, it's a film close to the liberal heart, produced by the premier Hollywood liberal, Dore Schary. Fortunately, it makes its point without preachiness and, mercifully, without overindulging in whimsy. (An exception to the latter is the boy's fantasy about his grandfather's encounter with a king.) Dean Stockwell, 12 years old at the time but looking a couple of years younger, gives a refreshingly natural performance as the boy, Peter, free from the cutesiness that often weighed down performances by children in that era.

Sons and Lovers (Jack Cardiff, 1960)

Dean Stockwell and Wendy Hiller in Sons and Lovers

Cast: Dean Stockwell, Wendy Hiller, Trevor Howard, Mary Ure, Heather Sears, William Lucas, Conrad Phillips, Ernest Thesiger, Donald Pleasance, Rosalie Crutchley, Sean Barrett. Screenplay: Gavin Lambert, T.E.B. Clarke, based on a novel by D.H. Lawrence. Cinematography: Freddie Francis. Production design: Thomas N. Morahan. Film editing: Gordon Pilkington. Music: Mario Nascimbene.

Dean Stockwell has had an interesting career, or rather three careers. He started as a child actor in movies like Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney, 1945) and The Boy With Green Hair (Joseph Losey, 1948), then matured into a handsome actor of considerable resources, holding his own in the company of Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, and Jason Robards in Sidney Lumet's 1962 filming of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. He never quite made it as a movie star, however, and did most of his work in television before re-emerging in the 1980s as an off-beat character actor, most memorably in Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984), Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986), and Married to the Mob (Jonathan Demme, 1988), earning an Oscar nomination for the last film. Sons and Lovers is probably Stockwell's most impressive work as a young leading man. He maintains a credible British accent and stands up well to such legendary actors as Wendy Hiller and Trevor Howard. The film itself is more solid than impressive. It was originally envisioned by producer Jerry Wald with Montgomery Clift as Paul Morel, but fell afoul of the Production Code enforcers' strictures on extramarital sex: For the story to make any sense, or at least to cohere to something like D.H. Lawrence's vision of the characters, Paul has to deflower the repressed Miriam (Heather Sears) and have a passionate affair with Clara (Mary Ure), who is married but separated from her husband. So the film was shelved and Clift grew too old for the role. When the Code was on its last legs, Wald revived the project and commissioned a fresh screenplay. The film version tosses out a lot of the novel, but tries to evoke Lawrence's vision of the somewhat Oedipal relationship of Paul and his mother (Hiller) and her still-simmering sexual attraction to Paul's father (Howard), as well as the frigidity instilled in Miriam by her pious mother (Rosalie Crutchley). The relationship with Clara is a bit more sketchy, suggesting that social pressure rather than psychosexual incompatibility leads to its breakup. All of these relationships encumber the film with a lot of talk, though Freddie Francis's cinematography gives it a good deal of visual interest. Francis won a well-deserved Oscar for his deft use of the often unwieldy CinemaScope aspect ratio, coming up with some impressive compositions, sometimes placing the actors off to the side in long-shots and often posing one figure in the foreground and another recessed into the frame. It may also be noted that the director, Jack Cardiff, was himself an Oscar-winning cinematographer.

Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984)

Nastassja Kinski and Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas

Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas has so much going for it: the performances of Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell, the dialogue by Sam Shepard, the cinematography of Robby Müller, the music by Ry Cooder. It won every major award at Cannes. So why do I feel like it's an unsatisfying film? It's not that I demand resolution from a work of art: That's a criterion long absent from modern and postmodern criticism. Life doesn't resolve itself, so why should art? I think it's partly that Paris, Texas resolves too much -- namely, its initial mystery: Why is Travis Henderson (Stanton) wandering in the desert, speechless and amnesiac? But the film doesn't make the explanation resonate with anything other than the failure of a marriage -- or perhaps two, since the marriage of Walt (Stockwell) and Anne (Aurore Clément) seems to be held together only by Travis's son, Hunter (Hunter Carson), whom they have been raising since his disappearance. It's as if L'Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960) had concluded with an explanation for Anna's disappearance, when in fact that unresolved disappearance is the whole point of the film: a catalyst for the experiences of Claudia and Sandro. Are we supposed to feel that the reunion of Jane (Nastassja Kinski) with Hunter -- a sex worker and an uprooted child -- is a kind of closure? It was Jane, after all, who gave up Hunter to Walt and Anne after Travis's first disappearance. For me, the first half of Paris, Texas is brilliant moviemaking: among other things in its superb use of landscape -- both the bleakness of Texas and the freeway- and airport-choked Southern California -- as a correlative for the lives of Travis and Walt. It's when Travis takes Hunter on the road in a needle-in-a-haystack search for Jane that the film falls apart. Wenders had already made a film about this kind of search: Alice in the Cities (1974), which seems to me a more satisfying film than Paris, Texas because it doesn't overreach itself, it doesn't complicate things with too many backstories and too much striving toward significance. It comes as no surprise to learn that the film was only half-written when it was begun, and that Shepard, who had been called away to work on another film, literally phoned in the climactic narrative in which Travis explains his disappearance. Though it's a tribute to the brilliance of both Shepard and Stanton that the scene comes off as well as it does, it plays as a set piece, and not as an organic part of what has gone before.