Green segued to the director's chair with the modest thriller "River Beat" (1954). But he excelled at social dramas ranging from the underrated "The Angry Silence" (1960), about a strike organizer, "The Mark" (1961), with Stuart Whitman in an Oscar-nominated portrayal of a sex offender whose past is held against him, and "A Patch of Blue" (1965), an interracial love story starring Sidney Poitier and Elizabeth Hartman. Many of his later features were on par with soap opera (e.g. "A Walk in the Spring Rain" 1970) or flat-out camp (i.e., "Once Is Not Enough" 1975). Green capped off his directing career with a series of TV-movies, generally built around strong female leads.