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.

House of Bamboo (Samuel Fuller, 1955)

Robert Ryan in House of Bamboo

Cast: Robert Ryan, Robert Stack, Shirley Yamaguchi, Cameron Mitchell, Brad Dexter, Sessue Hayakawa, Biff Elliot, Sandro Giglio, DeForest Kelley, Eiko Hanabusa. Screenplay: Harry Kleiner, Samuel Fuller. Cinematography: Joseph MacDonald. Art direction: Addison Hehr, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: James B. Clark. Music: Leigh Harline.

More slickly made and visually spectacular than the typical Samuel Fuller movie, House of Bamboo was the product of his flirtation with a major studio, 20th Century-Fox. Made on location, it gives us some fine CinemaScope images of mid-1950s Tokyo, though it sometimes drifts away from the story into tourist mode to justify them, as in the scene in which the guy we know as Eddie Kenner (Robert Stack) tours a Buddhist temple on the pretext of having a clandestine meeting with the cops he's secretly working for. There's also not much reason why Sandy Dawson (Robert Ryan) should climb to the rotating observation platform on top of Matsuma department store for the final shootout, other than to provide some views of the city below. There's also an infusion of romance between Eddie and his supposed "kimona girl," as Sandy calls her, Mariko (Shirley Yamaguchi), that's a little more sugary than we expect of Fuller's men and women. Despite his concessions, the studio wasn't happy working with Fuller, and he went his independent way again. It's certainly not a bad movie -- it has action and suspense and fine work by cinematographer Joseph MacDonald -- but it feels a bit superficial.

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (H.C. Potter, 1948)

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (H.C. Potter, 1948)

Cast: Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, Melvyn Douglas, Reginald Denny, Sharyn Moffett, Connie Marshall, Louise Beavers, Ian Wolfe, Harry Shannon, Tito Vuolo, Nestor Paiva, Jason Robards Sr., Lurene Tuttle, Lex Barker, Emory Parnell. Screenplay: Norman Panama, Melvin Frank, based on a novel by Eric Hodgins. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Carroll Clark, Albert S. D'Agostino. Film editing: Harry Marker. Music: Leigh Harline.

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House was made during the boom in house construction that followed World War II, so it had a ready audience in young couples with dreams of lovely homes. That audience tends to regenerate, so it's no surprise that the original film was loosely remade in 1986 as The Money Pit (Richard Benjamin) and even more loosely in 2007 as Are We Done Yet? (Steve Carr). The original is the best, of course, thanks largely to its trio of stars: Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, and Melvyn Douglas bring their immense charm and comedy skills to what is essentially a routine domestic sitcom. The pitfall in such a story is predictability: We know that every plan the Blandingses make will go awry, and usually in ways we can see coming a mile away. And the film has a smug racism characteristic of its era: A "faithful retainer" played by Louise Beavers, who seems to have no life of her own outside of serving the Blandingses; she follows them from Manhattan to Connecticut dutifully, and when she saves Blandings's job by coming up with an advertising slogan for his client, his response is to tell Mrs. Blandings to give her a $10 raise. We even see her in a newspaper advertisement as a kind of Aunt Jemima figure, grinning over a ham and her slogan.

Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953)

Thelma Ritter and Richard Widmark in Pickup on South Street

Cast: Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, Murvyn Vye, Richard Kiley, Willis Bouchey, Milburn Stone. Screenplay: Samuel Fuller, based on a story by Dwight Taylor. Cinematography: Joseph MacDonald. Art direction: George Patrick, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: Nick DeMaggio. Music: Leigh Harline.

What better thing can you say about Pickup on South Street than that J. Edgar Hoover hated it? Even though the bad guy in the film is a commie spy, he's really not much less a sleaze than the good guys: The film's protagonist is a pickpocket, after all, who sneers at patriotism and flag-waving. Samuel Fuller's peculiar mastery of the pulp genre was never more effective than in this film, which is distinguished by its performers: Richard Widmark as the pickpocket, teetering between vice and a grudging kind of virtue; Jean Peters as a bad girl with a good streak that only gets her beat up; and best of all, Thelma Ritter as the aging snitch who only wants enough money to have a good funeral. Ritter got an Oscar nomination out of the film, too. One of the darkest, and one of the best, film noirs.

The Big Steal (Don Siegel, 1949)

Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Patric Knowles, John Qualen, and William Bendix in The Big Steal

Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, William Bendix, Patric Knowles, Ramon Novarro, Don Alvorado, John Qualen, Pascual García Peña. Screenplay: Daniel Mainwaring, Gerald Drayson Adams, based on a story by Richard Wormser. Cinematography: Harry J. Wild. Art direction: Ralph Berger, Albert S. D'Agostino. Film editing: Samuel E. Beetley. Music: Leigh Harline.

Can film noir be funny? The Big Steal is unquestionably noirish, reteaming as it does the pair from the über-noir Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947), Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, and involving a lot of twists and turns in its plot centered on a payroll heist. But director Don Siegel and his cast give it a lightness and wit that elicits as much amusement as suspense. Ramon Novarro has some droll moments as a Mexican police inspector.