Daily Archives: Wednesday, December 16, 2015

  • Blackboard Jungle

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Brooks (1955)

    The music played over the opening credits is ‘Rock Around the Clock’, performed by Bill Haley and the Comets:  it was thanks to the success of Blackboard Jungle that the epochal song really took off commercially.  (It spent eight weeks at number one in the Billboard charts from July 1955 and was number one in Britain in late November-early December of that year.  Strange as this seems, the single, according to Wikipedia, had first entered the British charts in January 1955 – before it charted in America and before the release of Blackboard Jungle, in late March.)   Even before the music is heard, a scrolling prologue makes the filmmakers’ intentions very clear:

    ‘We, in the United States, are fortunate to have a school system that is a tribute to our communities and to our faith in American youth.  Today we are concerned with juvenile delinquency — its causes – and its effects. We are especially concerned when this delinquency boils over into our schools.  The scenes and incidents depicted here are fictional.  However, we believe that public awareness is a first step toward a remedy for any problem.  It is in this spirit and with this faith that BLACKBOARD JUNGLE was produced.’

    There is no denying the cultural impact that Richard Brooks’s film, based on a novel by Evan Hunter (aka Ed McBain), made at the time.  Blackboard Jungle was controversial in terms of its themes, their presentation and the rock ‘n’ roll on the soundtrack.  Yet seeing it (for the first time) last night at BFI was the opposite of the experience of seeing Dance Hall earlier this week.  The relationships of the characters in Dance Hall gradually overtake its undoubted importance as a piece of social history.  In comparison, Blackboard Jungle, as a drama, is increasingly tedious.

    This is partly because the story of a schoolteacher who, through idealism and commitment, wins over a class of initially unpromising and antagonistic students is, by now anyway, a tired formula – although it’s interesting to see in Pauline Kael’s (largely favourable) note that ‘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’.  But the film is hard going for other reasons too:  although Kael commends Richard Brooks’s script ‘as sane and well worked out’, the plotting is laborious; and much of the acting is painful.  As Richard Dadier (the surname seems to have been chosen just so that the kids can nickname him ‘Daddio’), the new English teacher in an inner-city high school, Glenn Ford is conscientious but monotonous.  (It’s a relief when, near the end of the film, Dadier briefly loses his temper.)   Both the two main, crudely contrasted women’s parts – Richard’s anxious, pregnant wife and a supposedly vampish teaching colleague – are poor and the actresses playing them, Anne Francis and Margaret Hayes respectively, don’t make things any better.  Richard Kiley has a taking sad earnestness in his early scenes as the maths teacher Josh Edwards but your heart sinks when Josh brings his priceless collection of jazz records to school with the inevitable results.  By far the best thing in the staffroom is Louis Calhern (in one of his last films – he died in 1956), as a drily cynical veteran of the teaching profession.

    The film’s treatment of the teenage delinquents is striking.  As Rob Nixon’s TCM piece, used for the BFI programme note, says:

    ‘… unlike films with similar themes and impact, such as Rebel Without a Cause …, this picture maintained a more moralistic tone, seeking not so much to understand and sympathise with the worst elements of society as to eliminate them.  …’

    In other words, there’s next to no suggestion in Blackboard Jungle that the antisocial tendencies of the youths in Richard Dadier’s class are the result of economic disadvantage or of being misunderstood by parents or by society more generally – even though these were clichés by the time Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics of ‘Gee, Officer Krupke!’ (and West Side Story was first staged in the late summer of 1957).  The chief troublemakers, Artie West (Vic Morrow) and his sidekick Belazi (Dan Terranova), are presented as incorrigible – the way that hardened lawbreakers would have been in a conventional contemporary crime film.  The other delinquents, who join in, have the potential for salvation.  What unifies the boys in the class is that their behaviour comes across as strenuous overplaying, on the part of actors rather less young than they’re meant to be.   There’s one exception to this rule in Blackboard Jungle:  a twenty-seven year old Sidney Poitier is altogether remarkable in the role of Gregory Miller.  Miller looks to be the only black student in the whole school until Richard Dadier discovers him one day at the piano, singing ‘Go Down Moses’ with a few other African-American boys – and thus revealing a different side to Miller’s hitherto uncooperative personality.  Until he turns against Artie West, the script virtually ignores the question of how Miller’s ethnicity affects how the other boys see him – shared delinquency appears to transcend racial difference – but Poitier does a fine job of conveying the tensions at work in Gregory Miller.   His mannerisms as an actor are already apparent in this early role but he is, in terms of temperament, surprisingly exciting – and different from the inevitably honourable screen presence he would become over the course of the next decade or so (to such an extent that, by 1967, he was the alchemising teacher in To Sir, With Love).

    8 August 2014

  • Crazy Heart

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Scott Cooper (2009)

    A drunken, on-the-slide Country & Western singer-songwriter who falls in love as his life falls apart is reliable Oscar bait.  Sure enough, Jeff Bridges has taken his chance and, earlier this week, the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrait of ‘Bad’ Blake in Crazy Heart.   Bridges isn’t the whole show:  his co-star is Maggie Gyllenhaal, perhaps the best American film actress of her generation, and the supporting cast includes Robert Duvall, whose presence can now be seen as talismanic.  He was the last man before Bridges to win the Oscar for a C&W role, in Tender Mercies.   The one-sentence plot summary of that film on its Wikipedia page explains that it’s the story of ‘Mac Sledge, a recovering alcoholic country music singer who seeks to turn his life around through his relationship with a young widow and her son’.  The corresponding description for Crazy Heart tells you that Bad Blake is ‘a down-and-out country music singer-songwriter who tries to turn his life around after beginning a relationship with a young journalist named Jean’.  She’s a single mother with a young boy.  (Robert Duvall is also one of the producers of Crazy Heart.  Jeff Bridges is one of its executive producers.)

    Bridges, Gyllenhaal and Duvall are all exceptionally good but you’re highly aware of the performances they’re giving.  This isn’t because they’re playing in a showy, attention-grabbing way.  It’s because there’s hardly anything else going on in Crazy Heart.  All you can do is observe the acting and, splendid though it is, it’s insufficient when the story is so uneventful and the characters are so thinly written.  If Scott Cooper’s adaptation is anything like faithful to the original, a 1987 novel by Thomas Cobb, that must be, without the animating presence of these actors, a decidedly underwhelming read.   Jeff Bridges has been an intuitive screen actor since his debut in The Last Picture Show nearly forty years ago.  I don’t think this is his best-ever performance – or, given the way the role is written, that it can be.  Bridges is an essentially benign presence:  the character he’s playing here, from what we see, has done more harm to himself than to anyone else, and the structure of the story means that it doesn’t take long for Jean to bring out the good in Bad.  (We never learn his real name.)  Bridges’s Jack in The Fabulous Baker Boys was much more intriguingly and disquietingly self-centred.  Still, Bridges expresses Bad Blake’s layers of experience and disappointment truly and effortlessly, he’s often really funny, and he’s marvellous picking out tunes on his guitar.  I wasn’t sure at the start that his voice was good enough to make you believe Bad was once a much better singer than he is now.  This stops being an issue because, like Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line, you come to experience Bridges’s singing as an expression of the character he’s creating and what you hear is therefore absorbing.  To be honest I couldn’t make out what Bridges was saying a lot of the time, either on or off stage, but there’s so little variation in the tone of Crazy Heart and so little information that you need to know to follow the story that it soon didn’t matter.  You get the general idea even if you can’t make out the words.

    Maggie Gyllenhaal’s vividness gives the film, and Jeff Bridges, a lift as soon as she appears as Jean.  She combines natural warmth and intelligence in a really exciting and original way.  In the early scenes with Bad, Jean flashes her smile nervously, as a means of keeping her distance from him (it becomes a different smile as they get closer).  Her mixed feelings come through in shadow movements and mannerisms that she uses both as a come-on and as a form of self-protection.  And while Jean may be an ambivalent lover, Gyllenhaal makes clear that, as a mother, she’s unconditionally adoring of her son, and capable.  It’s amazing what Robert Duvall, keeping himself in the background to Bridges but precise and penetrating (and audible), manages to do with the even more meagre role of Bad’s old friend, Wayne.  (I may already have forgotten but I think Wayne is a recovered alcoholic, who now works behind a bar.)   Jack Nation, as Jean’s son Buddy, is a very natural performer and Jeff Bridges is great with him.  All the smaller parts are well, if sometimes a little deliberately, played – the only mistake in the casting is Colin Farrell, as the young C&W star Tommy Sweet.  Farrell is a remarkably charmless actor and a clumsy one too:  the occasional bits of characterising gesture he goes in for look like what they are – bits.  Even if the idea is that Tommy Sweet, who learned all he knows from Bad, is self-serving, Farrell’s interpretation makes this stupidly obvious:  he’s utterly lacking in the apparent qualities that would draw audiences to Tommy.

    Perhaps – to give him the benefit of the doubt – Scott Cooper, whose first feature this is, wanted to break with the melodramatic, lively conventions of C&W lives on screen; but this seems a pointless exercise if you’re not going to put anything else in their place.  The storytelling is poor:  it’s never clear, for example, just how big a name Bad used to be.  (People in the film say they can’t believe he’s drinking in their bar or buying cigarettes in their store yet when Jean first goes to interview him she asks questions like ‘How did you get started in country music?’)  You feel something bad must happen to Buddy while Bad is looking after him – and you feel bad yourself that, because Crazy Heart is so dreary, it’s a relief when the child goes missing.  Something has happened and, however predictable and unoriginal it is, at least there will have to be an injection of (melo)drama as it works itself out.  Crazy Heart won a second Oscar, for Best Song – ‘The Weary Kind’ by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett.  (Ryan Bingham also has a small part in the film.  By a strange coincidence, he shares his name with the George Clooney character in Up in the Air.)  As words and music, ‘The Weary Kind’ is just the latest example of how devalued the Best Song category has become in recent years.  Within the film, it works well enough in dramatic terms:  Bad gradually develops the song, convinced it’s going to be the best thing he’s ever written.   It’s an anti-climax, though, that the finished product, which has proved to be the success Bad hoped for, is performed by Colin Farrell.  The film’s title is a phrase in the song.  It’s no surprise that Fox Searchlight decided that Crazy Heart might be better for box office than ‘The Weary Kind’ but the latter is a better description of the way this member of the audience felt leaving the Odeon.

    10 March 2010

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