Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 14-August-05
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Blackboard Jungle (1955)

In "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," the first film in this month's Back-to-School series, the students made a teacher miserable by stealing his cap, indulging in pranks, and refusing to curb their enthusiasm while they were supposed to be reading Cicero. Two decades later, the boys in "Blackboard Jungle" terrorize their teachers with threats, assault, and rape, and they probably think Cicero is a guy at the docks who can hook you up if you want to party. Yes, when Mr. Chips sent his lads into a postwar future with a Victorian twinkle in his eye, little did he know that the world was in the midst of a major upheaval that would lay his traditions to rest. And whereas his Brookfield School was an oasis upon which the outside world intruded, the inner-city high in "Blackboard Jungle" is a seething madhouse where all of society's problems are laid bare.

It's fascinating that while so much separates the teacher movies of the '30s and '50s, so little has changed in the fifty years since "Blackboard Jungle" was released. When soft-spoken veteran Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford) arrives at an all-boys school in lower-class New York, he finds harried "educators" whose primary job is keeping the lid on teenage anarchy. The root of the problem, he finds, is widespread and not easily countered. While his class undoubtedly includes a couple of bad seeds (Vic Morrow, notably), most of the boys are products of a socioeconomic environment marked by poverty, racial prejudice, and the substitution of gangs for absentee parents. As if their feral anger didn't make getting through to them hard enough, Dadier also contends with the lack of respect accorded to teachers in general, both by society at large and by his colleagues themselves. How can a man who wants to shape children's minds and futures succeed in a culture where nobody cares about what he does? How, indeed.

Dadier struggles with these issues over the course of a year, hanging on to a sliver of hope while his fellow staff members either fail (like a math geek played by Richard Kiley) or succumb to disgusted ennui (like a brittle temptress played by Margaret Hayes). In addition to persistence, he has one weapon in his arsenal: a brilliant and charismatic student named Miller (Sidney Poitier), who acts as an on-again, off-again ally in his quest to attract attention as something other than a punching bag. Ford and Poitier make a riveting pair of comrades, two strong wills fighting a losing battle but proclaiming their worth by trying.

The hero's crusade almost blows up in his face when it imperils his young wife (Anne Francis), and the quick resolution of this issue is the weak point of the film. (Actually, I could do without Francis altogether, although it helps to see Dadier both on and off the battlefield.) But overall, "Blackboard Jungle" is most eloquent in making points that sidestep the easy way out. The filmmakers state at the beginning, "We are especially concerned when [juvenile] delinquency boils over into our schools...[and] we believe that public awareness is a first step toward a remedy for any problem." They make a good stab at raising such awareness. Maybe someday a remedy will be found.

Copyright © 2005 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.