Blackboard Jungle
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