# Posted 11:48 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

OXBLOG FILM CLASSICS -- SIDNEY POITIER DOUBLE FEATURE: The films on the agenda for today are Blackboard Jungle (1955) and To Sir, With Love (1967). The films work very well side by side since both tell the story of first-time teachers who take jobs at inner city schools only to discover that their students are completely out of control. In time, however, the teachers' dedication and empathy transforms their students into mature young men and women.

The side-by-side comparision of Blackboard and To Sir is also instructive because Poitier plays the rebellious student in the first film and the teacher in the second. Both performances are masterful. As student Gregory Miller, Poitier blends the sullen resentment and untapped potential of many an overlooked and underprivileged young man.

Poitier is even more impressive as Mark Thackeray, the out-of-work engineer who makes the decision to teach in London's East End. Thackeray is a fascinating combination of social awkwardness, intellectual ambition, human warmth and latent rage. Each one of his interactions with his students brings out an unexpected combination of these traits.

While Blackboard and To Sir were made only 12 years apart, they seem to be a full generation apart. The acting in Blackboard is of the stilted, artificial kind that seems so jarring to the modern viewer. (Poitier's performance is an exception and, as a result, seems far ahead of its time.) In To Sir, we come face to face with young men and women who would seem in place in any high-school classroom in America today, despite the fact that they are British and poor and living in 1967.

The difference in acting styles also accentuates the difference of the messages conveyed by the respective films. The message in Blackboard is explicity political and often makes the film seem more like a modern parody of 1950s culture than an actual product of the time. The strangeness begins with the film's trailer, which preceded the main feature on my copy of the cassette. In the manner of Reefer Madness, it promises to convey a shocking truth that naive and patriotic Americans have for too long ignored.

Given what inner-city schools are like today, one immediately begins to wonder whether any thing that happened in the 1950s could really have been all that bad. There are no guns in the film and drugs play a very minor role, so you figure that things can't really be all that bad. On the other hand, protagonist Glenn Ford (playing Rick Dadier) is beaten badly by his own students in a planned nighttime attack. The same students appear to be professional criminals who rob trucks after class. And at the climax of the film, one of them pulls a knife on Ford in class. Did things like that really happen in the 1950s? I don't know.

While this sort of scaremongering about inner-city youth might come off as racist today, its purpose in the film is to advance a liberal agenda. After all, the moral of the story is that if a teacher never gives up on underprivileged kids, they will shine through in the end. Thus, Blackboard manages in the space of a couple of hours to be both disturbingly alarmist and naively optimistic.

In contrast, To Sir has much less of a social agenda. While it does suggest that committed teachers can resolve a systemic crisis in education, the students come away mainly with a more mature approach to the constant challenges of life in the British working class. Moreover, they begin the film far more time than their Blackboard counterparts, who are miraculously transformed into patriotic Americans.

If I were to advance one main criticism of both films, it is that the moments of epiphany at which the students suddenly abandon the Dark Side of the Force seems improbable. To be fair, real-life student-teacher relations develop subtly over the course of months. To portray them in a matter of hours is all but impossible. Still, it seems like both sets of students are following a script when they undergo their conversions. It's never clear why they reject their goodhearted teachers at first but then come around when the time is right.

In the final analysis, To Sir, With Love is the superior film, one whose artistic merit should be evident to audiences today. However, Blackboard Jungle is still plenty worth watching, both for its historical value as well as the chance to observe a magnificent actor about to become a major star.

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