Youth on Screen. David Buckingham
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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.
However, as the message fades into the opening credits, the drumming gives way to Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ – a tune that seems to have been included in the hope of increasing its appeal to the younger audience. (It may well have been this, rather than anything about the film itself, that prompted the ‘riots’ that occurred on its release in the UK – as we’ll see in the following chapter.)
Unlike the other two films considered here, the central focus of Blackboard Jungle is not on the delinquents but on their teacher, Richard Dadier (played by Glenn Ford). The narrative follows Dadier as he confronts a recalcitrant high-school class in a racially mixed, working-class area of the city; and it also follows him into the staff room and into his home. We are told about the home environments of his students, but we do not see anything of them. The narrative is driven by questions about Dadier’s dedication to his task: will he become disillusioned and leave the teaching profession, or will he move to an easier, more middle-class school ‘where the children want to learn’ (an opportunity he is offered by his former professor)? In parallel with this is an element of suspense introduced right at the start of the film. Dadier’s wife is pregnant, but she has previously lost a baby. She narrowly avoids a car crash and subsequently comes under pressure when one of Dadier’s students sends her anonymous messages alleging that her husband is having an affair with one of the other teachers: Dadier is afraid that she will lose the baby once again.
The narrative of the film is essentially a series of tests of Dadier’s dedication. He saves a woman teacher from being assaulted, he and a colleague are attacked in the street, he witnesses some of his students stealing a newspaper truck, and members of his class smash up the math teacher’s treasured collection of jazz records. This all causes him to question himself, but he does not give up. He adopts modern teaching methods, using a tape recorder to record his students’ stories, and appears to be having some success with a debate about an animated film of Jack and the Beanstalk – an approach that even seems to impress one of his most cynical colleagues. However, he also gives voice to bitterness about the teachers’ lot, at one point comparing their poor rates of pay with those of other workers.
Ultimately, when his son is born (and survives a difficult birth) and his wife urges him to continue, Dadier decides to rededicate himself to the profession, as the sounds of New Year celebrations play on the radio. Highly sentimental as this may be, the film provides a powerful endorsement of the idealistic mission of inner-city teaching. On one level, Dadier is a familiar ‘teacher hero’. He claims that he wants to ‘help shape young minds’ and to ‘sculpt lives’, and he struggles to achieve this: yet his dedication is not seen as self-righteous, and the working lives of teachers are by no means glamorized.
All this implies that the film is constructed from Dadier’s perspective. Some of his students display the brooding menace of Brando’s Johnny Strabler – especially the ultimate villain, Artie West (played by Vic Morrow). On one occasion, West appears to justify himself with the claim that he has no hope for the future; but, like his fellow delinquents, he is eventually presented as a coward – ‘You’re not so tough without a gang to back you up,’ Dadier tells him. In the final classroom confrontation, his supporter Belazi is actually impaled with an American flag, before they are both marched downstairs for the punishment they clearly require.
However, with the possible exception of Gregory Miller (played by Sidney Poitier), we learn very little about what motivates these students. The debate about the causes of delinquency, and the potential treatment of it, is placed in the mouths of the adult characters. Dadier’s professor offers a mea culpa: ‘We at the university were to blame – we did not prepare the teachers to teach certain children of this generation …’ Later, a police officer offers a more extended historical account:
I’ve had lots of problem kids in my time, kids from both sides of the tracks. They were five or six years old in the last war. Father in the army, mother in the defence plant. No home life, no church life, no place to go. They formed street gangs … Maybe the kids today are like the rest of the world: mixed up, suspicious, scared. I don’t know, but I do know this. Gang leaders have taken the place of parents, and if you don’t stop them …
The policeman is interrupted before he can finish, but the onus is clearly placed on dedicated teachers to take the place of parents. The issue is not so much poverty as the failure of the family.
If Blackboard Jungle refuses any explanation based on social class (these things happen on ‘both sides of the tracks’), it does explore the question of race. One of Dadier’s first moves in attempting to win the control of his class is to seek the support of Gregory Miller. If Artie West is the ‘bad delinquent’, who ultimately proves to be beyond redemption, Miller is the ‘good delinquent’, who can be saved. Being black, Dadier tells him, is not an excuse for failing in school; and, right at the end of the film, Miller responds to Dadier’s encouragement by agreeing to stay on at school for a further year. However, Dadier runs into trouble when he uses racial slurs in an attempt to counter the prejudice and abuse he sees happening among his class and receives a strong lecture from the school principal. Although he is not guilty in this case, he later gets into a confrontation with Miller and unthinkingly calls him ‘You black –’, only to be consumed with remorse. In a particularly striking scene, we see him watching Miller and his black friends as they sing a version of the spiritual ‘Go Down Moses’ in preparation for the school’s Christmas concert. Significantly, Miller urges them not to syncopate (or ‘jazz up’) the melody, implying the need for a ‘respectable’ version of African-American culture. In all these respects, the film’s treatment of race is decidedly liberal, although it needs to be understood in its time: the Brown v. Board of Education decision that ended racial segregation in US schools took place the year before the film’s release and was still being massively resisted in many Southern states.
Like The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle was a highly controversial film and underwent close monitoring from the Production Code Administration. While the violence (especially the beating of Dadier and his colleague) may be relatively explicit for the time, the central concern appeared to be that younger viewers might emulate the delinquent characters, especially Artie West. While Brando was clearly older (and intended to be so), Artie and his gang were definitely teenagers (although Morrow was in fact twenty-six when the film was released). The Administration’s director, Geoffrey Shurlock, also worried that the film might purvey a negative image of America’s schools for international audiences, although ultimately very little direct censorship was imposed. Nevertheless, Shurlock received more criticism for his approval of this film than for any of the others he endorsed during his first five years as director. Along with The Wild One, the film was cited in submissions to Senator Kefauver’s Senate committee as evidence of the harmful effects of the movies – although it appears that Kefauver himself was unconvinced. Such anxiety seems particularly strange in this case, given the film’s adult focus and perspective: it says much more about the motivations of those involved in the debates than about the film itself.12
Rebel Without a Cause (directed by Nicholas Ray and also released in 1955) is probably the most celebrated of these films, but it is strikingly different from the others.13 Shot in colour and in Cinemascope, it appears quite melodramatic by comparison with the low-key black and white of the other two. Unlike Johnny Strabler and Richard Dadier’s students, the central character, Jim Stark (played by James Dean), is clearly middle class, and the setting is suburban. In the opening scene, we are introduced to Jim and two fellow students at his new high school, Judy and John (also known as Plato): all of them have been picked up by the police for various infractions. Later there is a knife fight and the famous scene of the ‘chickie run’, in which hot-rod cars are driven off a cliff, with fatal consequences. Yet the film’s explanations of these