On Screen:
DWORKIN, MARTIN S.
On SCREEN 'Blackboard Jungle' Seems Hazy Though Melodramatic By Martin S. Dworkin THE MOST disturbing thing about Blackboard Jungle is that its intentions are obviously honest and worthy. It...
...The picture of gang-ridden classrooms, the omnipresence of violence and the utter helplessness of teachers, both outnumbered by their proto-criminal charges and unsupported by the society they serve, may be deliberate exaggeration for purposes of arousal...
...At the first, held at the Museum of Modern Art, Jean Benoit-Levy, a close friend and associate of Epstein since his first explorations in cinema, introduced passages from Coeur Fidele, La Chute de la Maison Usher (after the Poe story), and Le Tempestaire, as well as the full-length Finis Terrae...
...Only at the last moment does the teacher finally win the support of those of the class for whom there is some hope—for a beginning at learning about decency, as well as the subjects of school education...
...And the weakness and incredibility of the ending reflects the confusion of exposition...
...The story follows the efforts of a new teacher, Glenn Ford, to gain enough control over his class so that he can make a bare beginning at teaching...
...It is pervaded by a sense of outrage, of speaking openly about uncomfortable issues (such as interracial frictions) of desperate immediacy and a need for something to be done at once...
...He sees another new instructor, Richard Kiley, quit after the boys shatter his prize collection of rare jazz records in an outbreak of senseless vandalism...
...But its statement of the problem is as fundamentally confused as it is powerfully vivid, and its proposed solutions are as hazy and ineffectual as they are melodramatically forceful...
...Not only are there new models of glorified irresponsibility for susceptible youngsters to emulate, in classrooms and out...
...For if the schools are so little able to maintain civilized standards of behavior—much less enforce a minimal discipline—the matter surely is no longer one for the schools, but for the police and other agencies of a society that must protect itself, even while taking the blame...
...Soon afterward, he receives a terrible beating from a gang of his students—as much to show him where the real authority in the school lies as to punish him for roughing up the rapist in capturing him...
...the school becomes only another part of the jungle—at best only a pause in their real education in becoming successful predators, in learning to survive in the world they never made, yet recreate endlessly...
...The deeper harm may be done through the film's ob-fuscation of the actual problems of our schools and streets...
...If what follows is really about delinquency invading the schools, the association with problems of teachers and teaching becomes gratuitous and misleading...
...The leader of these boys is played by Sidney Poitier with fine insight into the character of a Negro adolescent of superior ability, hiding hope beneath protective bitterness...
...The film society movement continues to grow...
...to him, the future is a bitter choice between a possibly light jail sentence and the Army, where he'd get his "head shot off...
...In a printed foreword, the film itself speaks of the delinquency problem as "boiling over" into the schools...
...It seeks to point up a problem, and offer solutions...
...It advocates better pay for teachers, better equipment and facilities...
...Of their many activities, none could be more worthy than the tribute organized by The Group for Film Study to the memory of a great French director, Jean Epstein...
...The educational problem, of course, is related to that of juvenile delinquency, but it is not identical with it...
...The worthier a cause, the more it may have to be saved from the good intentions of its friends...
...It offers hope that the unwilling, backward students can be reached—by such means as motion pictures...
...Epstein is a neglected master, whose work was important in the development of many film styles and techniques...
...In some ways, though, this may have less to do with the real problem as it exists, and more with conventions of a current cycle of films emphasizing and romanticizing brutality...
...This boy, played by Vic Morrow in the manner of the current Marlon Brando vogue, has become a criminal deliberately...
...Into the classrooms they bring the desperations and violences of the slum world in which they live...
...His pregnant wife, Anne Francis, almost loses her baby, after receiving poison-pen notes accusing him of philandering with the pretty teacher...
...There is much to be said for the view that the forms which the film gives to both will do more harm than good, despite good intentions...
...The boys are not in school to learn, but because they have to be...
...Thus it can be thought to follow that the problem of delinquency is a school problem, since delinquents go to school—although they arrive long after the family, the neighborhood, the social group, and other influences have formed the basis of character and behavior, and although the school can hold them from the numberless stimulations, drives and impacts of the world for but a few hours a day, during part of the year...
...In any case, the device of sheer sensationalism only hides the film's fundamental unclarity, which develops from the uncritical acceptance, by novelist Hunter and scenarist-director Brooks, of one of the dogmas of popular professional "educa-tionism": that the school should take upon itself any and every function that seems to devolve upon it...
...But what the problem really is falls into fragments under the succession of melodramatic shocks...
...The film praises the dedication of the teachers who stick it out in the blackboard jungles—instead of leaving for other professions or for jobs in better schools...
...He has to face an unjust charge of racial bias by an unknown accuser, leveled by the school principal, whose policy on the problem of discipline is to insist that there is no discipinary problem...
...there were some 258 societies around the country at the time of the second annual American Film Assembly held in New York early in April...
...The confusion of issues—fallacia plurium inlerrogationum—thus derives from one misconception or grandiose simplification, that makes it possible for the film to have its blackboard jungle and its happy ending of commando heroics, its deliberately exaggerated indictment and its conventionally melodramatic resolution...
...The Group's tribute is especially appropriate as Epstein's last film, Le Tempestaire, demonstrating novel uses of sound, will soon be shown here...
...In the final showdown, he has to disarm one precocious predator wielding a switchblade knife...
...Made from Evan Hunter's novel, and directed by Richard Brooks from his own screenplay, the film describes a big-city vocational high school for boys?the garbage can of the educational system," as one teacher puts it...
...The Group, which is accenting the work of great directors such as Pabst, Griffith, Dreyer, and Pudov-kin in its current series, presented in March and April two programs of excerpts and representative features of Epstein's work...
...Moreover, the suggestion of educational solutions, at least in the forms depicted, is hopelessly sentimental...
...Not only is there little to assist the recruitment of teachers, or to encourage respect for our school system...
...an animated cartoon of Jack and the Beanstalk is shown stimulating a discussion of moral issues...
...One of his first experiences is the rescue of a pretty young teacher from one of the boys, a would-be rapist...
Vol. 38 • April 1955 • No. 17
