The Sheila Variations

Pauline Kael: 5001 Movies: "Blackboard Jungle"

Last one for today.

Blackboard Jungle 1955

Blackboard Jungle 1955

It was a shocking movie at the time and was said to provoke violence, and when Clare Boothe Luce, then American ambassador to Italy, protested its showing at the Venice Film Festival, its international fame was assured. The subject -- contempt for authority (in a metropolitan trade school) -- is treated as a problem with a definite solution. Surrounded by hostile and delinquent boys, the hero, an idealistic teacher, played by Glenn Ford, tries to reach the salvageable one among them -- Sidney Poitier, who gives an angry, exciting performance. (He makes you feel his tensions and heat.) The director, Richard Brooks, wrote the script, adapted from Evan Hunter's novel, and it's sane and well worked out, though it's hard fo raudiences to believe in the hero's courage, and not hard at all for them to believe in the apathetic cowardice of the other teachers. If you excavate Evan Hunter's short story on which the rather shoddy novel was based, it's no big surprise to find that in the original account, "To Break the Wall", the teacher did not break through. Once again, a "daring" Hollywood movie exposes social tensions - touches a nerve - and then pours on sweet nothings. But along the melodramatic way, there are some startling episodes (and one first-rate bit of racial interchange), and recordings by Bix Beiderbecke, Stan Kenton, Bill Holman, and others set quite a pace. (The music behind the opening titles -- Bill Haley and the Comets on "Rock Around the Clock" -- really made people sit up.) Glenn Ford seethes all the time, but he's fairly competent. With Louis Calhern, who's always fun to watch; Margaret Hayes, as the teacher who's a candidate for rape; Anne Francis in the tiresome role of Ford's pregnant wife; Richard Kiley, as the embarrassingly weak-kneed teacher whose jazz records get smashed. Also with Vic Morrow as the Brando-style hoodlum.