Sherry Chandler

Fifty years after the fact, Blackboard Jungle strikes me as a very earnest movie dedicated to the proposition that all America’s troubled youth need is a really dedicated and creative English teacher, the kind who can weed out the bad apples and frog-march them down to the principle’s office.

It’s an attractive idea, I’ll admit.

I was ten years old when this movie was released, not old enough to see such dangerous fare but old enough to be impressed by the rock ‘n roll soundtrack. I had two teen-aged brothers. I knew from Bill Haley & his Comets. Update: According to Destitute Gluch, the film was banned in several cities for fear it would incite violence and Clare Booth Luce kept it from being shown at the Venice Film Festival.

Blackboard Jungle was always part of my cultural texture but somehow I never quite got around to seeing it. I knew it, or thought I knew it, by the rock ‘n roll revolution it helped inspire and by the string of B teen-aged rebel movies that followed it. (It reminds of of Jane Eyre in this way, a serious work that begat a pop genre.) I’m not talking Rebel Without a Cause or The Wild One here (the latter predates Blackboard Jungle and the former was released the same year), but drive-in movies like Teenage Thunder or Dragstrip Girl, even The Blob or I Was a Teenage Werewolf. The kind of thing parodied by John Waters’s Cry Baby, which may be the film that caused me to fall in love with Johnny Depp.

The film was adapted from an Evan Hunter novel of the same title and it rings some Ed McBain emotional clichés that were fifties staples: the vulnerable pregnant wife, the predatory career woman.

I don’t have anything very interesting to add to the reams that have been written about Blackboard Jungle. Just a couple of observations about anatomy as destiny. It struck me watching this movie that there is no way Sidney Poitier would ever be convincing as a punk. Anger, yes. He could play anger and pride as Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night. or anger and weakness as Walter Lee Younger in A Raisin in the Sun but he can never be surly and weak. He can sneer but he can’t sulk. He has, as Lance Mannion suggests, too much innate authority.

Vic Morrow, on the other hand, has just the right pouty-mouthed sulky look to be the punk gang-leader who will be revealed, at the end of the movie, to be a bully and a coward.

I’ve seen Glenn Ford characterized as a bland actor and he could certainly be accused of playing bland in his role as the English teacher and all-round good man, Richard Dadier. Dadier is that American stock character, the ordinary man pushed to extraordinary actions. In portraying Dadier, bland works to Ford’s advantage. Jimmy Stewart spent a lifetime playing just such characters but nobody who ever spent five minutes watching Stewart on screen ever really believed him to be ordinary. Likewise Gregory Peck, who played his own share of Dadier-like characters.

Glenn Ford, on the other hand, really can look 1950s ordinary.

I won’t say it’s because he’s Canadian.

Oh, I have to mention Jamie Farr, who as Jameel Farah, has a small role as that other stock gang member, the mentally challenged one. He grins a lot.

from Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Random House, 1965):

When we stand well back and survey the whole history of English versification over almost fifteen centuries, we perceive even through the philological upheavals a recurring pattern. The pattern described by metrical history is similar, perhaps, to the general shape of political history in that it consists of oscillations now toward ideals of tight control and unitary domination and now toward a relaxation of such control and domination. But metrical history differs from political in one important way: while political history can be shown to involve a very gradual total tendency toward, say, ideals of egalitarianism or public philanthropy, metrical history exhibits no such long-term “progressive” tendency. Meter has not really become “freer” over the centuries, and indeed “freedom” is not a virtue in meter—expressiveness is. The metrical imperative underlying the words that Yeats arranges is hardly less rigid and “perfect” than that underlying Chaucer’s poetic discourse; and in “free verse” that works there are imperatives no less visible.

This paragraph was written well before L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poetry but even that rebellious form has its imperatives.