James Clavell (1967)
A big box-office hit, especially in America, where the title song (by Don Black and Mark London) reached number one and, amazingly, ‘was Billboard magazine’s #1 pop single for the year’. To Sir, With Love is based on a semi-autobiographical novel by E R Braithwaite, about his experiences as a teacher in the East End of London, but the film – although it’s fairly entertaining – has no connection with reality. Mark Thackeray, born in British Guiana and newly arrived in England via the US, has a degree and wants a career in engineering. He gets work as a secondary school teacher in the meantime. The story has the potential for moral uplift x 2 because Mark is black and the schoolkids are from poor families and/or broken homes. In fact, the racial element is pretty muted. It climaxes with the funeral of the mother of the (one!) mixed race boy at the school but perhaps climax is the wrong word since there’s no build-up. Although Sidney Poitier as Mark appears to be the only negro in London, there’s not a hint of tension or prejudice or people staring at him, when he travels to work on the top of a double-decker or goes shopping in the local market. Just about the only racially abrasive remarks we hear come from one choleric and cynical member of the teaching staff (Geoffrey Bayldon), who likens Mark to a ‘Lamb to the slaughter … or should I say black sheep?’ and mentions black magic, voodoo, etc. Some of the kids ask Mark about the black women they’ve seen in a television ‘travelogue’ (their word – although it seems an unlikely one for them to use). That’s about it
Mark keeps exhorting the kids to behave like adults but who’d want to be an adult if it turned you into someone as humourlessly dignified as he is? It’s pointless to take issue with the casting of Sidney Poitier, even though he gives off an air of visiting royalty throughout. The makers of this British film must have been thrilled to get him for the role and the commercial success of To Sir, With Love was no doubt thanks largely to Poitier’s celebrity, at its peak in 1967 (when Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night were also released). Poitier is a lot more likeable on the rare occasions that he loosens up, as when Mark talks excitedly about the food and drink he enjoys – the news that he has an appetite for something other than moral improvement is a real relief. Apart from Bayldon, who gives his primitive role some depth, and Patricia Routledge, vividly eccentric in one of her few big-screen appearances, the school’s small staff are a dreary lot. Edward Burnham is inoffensive as the head but Faith Brook is abominably stagy as his deputy and Suzy Kendall vapid as a pretty young teacher who seems too tentative even to decide whether she fancies Mark, let alone do anything about it if she does. Outside the school itself, Rita Webb is, unsurprisingly, the standout.
The most amazing piece of information I’ve dug up about this picture is that, according to IMDb, To Sir, With Love earned James Clavell a Directors’ Guild of America nomination. I can’t remember when I last saw a film made with such flagrant ineptitude. (That’s not true: July 2008: Mamma Mia!) When Mark takes the kids to a museum, the montage of stills of the outing, accompanied by the title song (which I’ve always liked, and which Lulu sings well, but which doesn’t merit as many reprises as it gets), hardly seems to be direction at all. When the school kids cross the racial divide and turn out for their classmate’s mother’s funeral, the camera pans across their smiling faces; Clavell keeps it there until the grins have frozen. (Why are they smiling anyway on such an occasion?) This is only the worst instance of a cut taking forever to happen. A sequence in the school gym when Mark, who’s taking a boxing class for reasons I’ve forgotten, is provoked into throwing a punch, is ineffably crude. Clavell also did the screenplay and you get the distinct impression of clumsy abbreviation of the source material. The school seems meant to be distinctively liberal in its educational approach but there’s no real explanation of what that approach is. Mark’s class are about to leave school but there’s no mention of what they’re going to do next until Clavell sticks in a bit about careers near the end. When Mark gets a job as an engineer, he doesn’t appear to have a crisis of conscience about leaving teaching. That might sound a welcome omission but he then decides to stay where he is and to turn down the engineering job for no other reason, apparently, than that the kids give him a tankard as a thank-you present.
The young actors playing Mark’s class mostly overact working-class boredom and low educational accomplishments. No matter how inarticulate the kids are supposed to be, their lines sound elocuted. They sustain their Cocker-knee ecksintz with considerable effort, except when Clavell forgets who they are socially. (At the end-of-year social, one girl greets another with a surprising ‘You look marvellous!’) Lulu was only eighteen or nineteen when the film was made – perhaps it’s because she was already so experienced and groomed as a pop star that she looks about thirty-five, older than exact contemporaries like Adrienne Posta (who makes less impression than I expected) and Judy Geeson (who’s too classy but luminously pretty as the schoolgirl with none of the mousy teacher’s qualms about acting on her feelings for Sir). The boys are less lively than the girls, although Christian Roberts and Christopher Chittell both give decent performances. In one of the dreariest exchanges in the film, the kids tell Mark Thackeray they’re rebels because they don’t respect adults, who’ve made a mess of the world. When you hear this, you suspect that this younger generation does, after all, have the potential for the pompous censoriousness they’ll need to become grown-ups as dreary as Mark is, and wants them to be. They’re probably Daily Mail readers now.
3 July 2010
