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Highly Overrated But Still Good

Great Film overall

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Glenn Ford is a teacher, sent to a boys' high school in a bad neighborhood. After a disastrous first day, he's temped to leave and try and find work in another area. But, as he and his pregnant wife Anne Francis know, there's no position available anywhere else. If there were, he would have gone there in the first place. So, as his fellow teachers Louis Calhern, Margaret Hayes, and Richard Kiley, advise him, he just has to keep his head down and survive the school year. They're not teaching boys who have dreams of college, a career, or a lustrous life; their students are hoodlums who get in daily fights and bring knives to class.Glenn Ford was such a prolific actor and made memorable classics in several genres, but Blackboard Jungle is one of his most iconic roles. He's naturally sincere and passionate and delivers his lines so convincingly it's as if he thought of them on the spot instead of reciting Richard Brooks's script. When he tries to help the lost-cause students, you're inspired, when he singles out one of the kids to try and get an ally in the classroom, you see the same potential, and when he finally looses his temper, you're similarly enraged.While there have been dozens of remakes throughout the decades about a do-good-er teacher who is sent to a school in the slums and tries to make a difference, Blackboard Jungle was the first. It was particularly gritty for its time, but even now it's still extremely suspenseful and hard to watch. As if the boundary-pushing subject matter wasn't reason enough to make this classic famous, it propelled Sidney Poitier to stardom. It wasn't his first movie, but the film was nominated for four Oscars and became very famous. In case you've never seen this film and naturally assumed Sidney was cast as the noble teacher because of his famous classic To Sir, with Love, which is one of the more famous remakes in the genre, he's actually one of the unruly students! So if you've only seen him in strictly good-guy roles, you might want to rent this one and see him in a different part.Kiddy Warning: Obviously, you have control over your own children. However, due to gritty violence I wouldn't let my kids watch it. Also, there may or may not be a rape scene.

I have to take issue with other reviewers who question the credibility of the story. The script was based on the original novel by Evan Hunter, which was inspired by his own true life experiences as a severely challenged and very disappointed public high school teacher in the South Bronx of New York City. Unfortunately, many of our inner city schools have only become more miserable with time, as difficult as that may be to believe.This film was a success as the result of an excellent, fast moving script and a fine set of actors who bring out the best of each other's abilities. The action is paced very well with four separate instances of brutal violence distributed evenly throughout the time frame. In between, the central character, Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford) struggles with his decision to accept a teaching job in the inner city when he could easily find employment in a much better school where his academic mentor serves as principal. While Dadier's decision to tough it out is commendable, how many folks in his place would have opted for the other school? I thought that this was one of Ford's most convincing and most intelligent performances, and he has appeared in many movies.Sidney Poitier is excellent as Miller, the stereotype-defying student identified early by Dadier as a potential leader who could help him steer the class away from total disruption and chaos. In a little more than a decade later, as the lead in "To Sir With Love", Poitier would be standing in Dadier's shoes as a teacher in another rough inner city high school, this time on the other side of the Atlantic in London, England. Was that just a casting coincidence or perhaps deliberate? Watching Richard Kiley portraying the idealistic and quite naïve Josh Edwards, I had difficulty believing that this was the very same man who played a much more charismatic idealist on stage a decade later as Don Quixote in the musical, "Man of La Mancha". What a difference a decade makes. Vic Morrow is unforgettable as the detestable rascal, Artie West. I suppose that Dadier would be fired today for knocking this scoundrel repeatedly against the blackboard, but who needs this impossible job anyway when you can do much better somewhere else and where you might even be appreciated by your students?The title song "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and His Comets is one of my favorite early rock 'n roll tunes of the 1950's. Unfortunately, using the song as the film's theme song may have perpetuated the idea among many adults at the time that rock 'n roll music contributed to what they termed then as "juvenile delinquency". In reality, many of us managed to stay out of jail in spite of the fact that we loved rock 'n roll then, and we still love it to this day while maintaining relatively clean rap sheets.

Probably the granddaddy of all those films about a headstrong teacher who's able to break through to a bunch of underprivileged kids when everyone else has given up on them and, though the oldest, the toughest and most biting of the ones I've seen.Unlike other movies of its kind, where the teacher pretty much becomes the best friend of everyone in his/her class, "Blackboard Jungle" doesn't wrap things up as cosily or tidily. Glenn Ford's teacher certainly earns his class's respect, but not completely their trust. And Ford is not the saint in teacher's clothing that you might think a film from 1955 would make him. In one key encounter with an African-American student (Sidney Poitier) who he has singled out as having the makings of a leader, Ford's character exposes the racism that he knows he shouldn't feel but does anyway. In a decade of films not known for their nuance or subtlety, "Blackboard Jungle" handles the question of race in a somewhat delicate manner and makes a much more complex study of it than audiences who are used to many of the other cinematic offerings from around the same time period would expect.Another thing that struck me about the film was its handling of the World War and its aftermath. In the 1950s, a film could perhaps be critical of war in the abstract, but it would find itself on thin ice if it tried to be too critical of America's involvement in World War II, and it certainly could not suggest that there were serious social problems as a result of the war. This was a decade in which people wanted to believe in the American Dream, that men were proud to serve their country and settle into lives as worker drones and that women were happy to be doting housewives. What to make of a film like "Blackboard Jungle," then, that outright blames the absentee parenting brought about by the social upheaval of the war for juvenile delinquency? And the film is honest too about America's treatment of draftees to its wars. The kids in this film, poor and disenfranchised, know that they'll be the first ones drafted into Korea or whatever war America will be fighting next, treated like grunts, and disposed of when their usefulness expires.Glenn Ford gives a truly terrific performance in "Blackboard Jungle," an award-worthy one that nevertheless went unnoticed for awards attention. The film did garner four Academy Award nominations though it won none of them: Best Screenplay (Richard Brooks, who also directed), Best Art Direction (B&W), Best Cinematography (B&W) and Best Film Editing.Grade: A

***SPOILERS*** As the new English teacher Richard Dadier, or Daddy-O as his students call him , played by Glenn Ford soon finds out he has his hands full in dealing with those he's assigned to teach the fine points of the English language. Not listening to his instructions as well as throwing paper airplanes all around the classroom and smoking in the rest room was nothing compared to what was in store for him when he checked into, after classes, the school library. To Mr. Dadier's shock & surprise there was the sex crazed and hopped up red blooded all American Boy Joe Murray, Peter Miller, attempting to rape and ravage pretty and provocatively dressed music teacher Lois Hammond, Margaret Hayes, right in front of his eyes! With Murray trying to escape Dadier he tried to jump out the window breaking the glass and messing up his handsome face in the process! What happened to Murray didn't stand well with school bully and class joker Artie West, Vic Morrow, who rightfully felt that his position of power and leadership in the school was being threatened by Daddy-O or Mr.Dadier. Determined to put Dadier in his place as a see hear and know nothing high school teacher West has his gang of thugs do everything to make his life miserable and get him to quit his job at the school. It's when Dadier stands up to West & Co. dirty tactics he become even more extreme. That all leads to the destruction of Dadier's fellow mathematics teacher Josh Edwards', Richard Kiley, priceless 78MP record collection, that he brought to show his students, by West's gang " The Westies" that not only lead him to quit the school but teaching altogether! The tipping point in all this violence by West was when he tried to break up Dadier's marriage to his about to give birth wife Anne, Anne Francis, by sending her racy letters, with no return addresses, and phoning her about an affair her husband was having with music teacher Lois Hammond which as it turned out was nothing but a load of horse sh*t! This set the stage for the showdown at the school with an outraged Dadier and and switchblade wheeling West that ended the movie with a bang! We get to see that the macho and I don't give a damn West was nothing but a coward when he had to face Dadier all by himself with his gang, by coming to their senses, having deserted him. And like the wimpy coward that he is all West could do is cry like a little baby when he was taken to the principle's office to get his behind tanned for all the trouble he caused in school! There's also actor Sidney Poitier as Grge "The knife" Miller who we find out is really a good not bad boy, he plays a mean piano and is a member of the high school glee club, who just happened to have felling in with the wrong crowd!P.S The film's theme song "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haily and the Comets was the first Rock & Roll song to be put into a major motion picture and zoomed, after the movie "Blackboard Jungle" was released, to the top of the music charts staying at the #1 spot for some eight weeks! The song made Rock & Roll which was thought to be a major cause for juvenile delinquency, by most of the public, respectable.