Blackboard Jungle
Short description
Richard Dadier takes a teaching job at North Manual High School, an inner-city school where discipline has broken down and many students show open hostility toward their teachers. As an English instructor, he tries different ways to reach his class and get them interested in learning, but he meets resistance from the students and little support from a staff that has largely given up. He faces threats, violence and schemes meant to drive him out, while tensions among the students run along lines of race and background.
The film was directed by Richard Brooks, who also wrote the screenplay, and produced by Pandro S. Berman for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It runs 101 minutes and belongs to the crime and drama genres. Glenn Ford plays Richard Dadier, with Anne Francis as his wife Ann, Louis Calhern as Jim Murdock, Margaret Hayes as Lois Judby Hammond, John Hoyt as Mr. Warneke and Richard Kiley as Joshua Y. Edwards. It was released in March 1955, arriving between Brooks's The Last Time I Saw Paris and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
On IMDb the film holds a critics' rating of 7.4/10 from 27 reviews, while on TMDB it has a rating of 6.9/10 from 165 votes, indicating that professional reviewers rated it somewhat more favorably than the general audience did.
What's left behind the scenes
- The eponymous short story of 1955 by Evan Hunter (1926-2005), which served as the literary source, told of his own teaching experience in the South Bronx district of New York. Over time, Evans (born Salvatore Albert Lombino) adopted the literary pseudonym Ed McBain, under which he gained fame as a detective novelist.
- According to Paul McCartney, when he was 15 and George Harrison (1943-2001) was 14, they really wanted to see this movie because they had heard that it featured the song "Rock Around The Clock" by "Bill Haley and the Comets" (1952-1981). However, viewers under 16 were not allowed into the film. Harrison looked so young that McCartney took some dirt and smeared it on his upper lip, believing that it would look like Harrison already had a mustache and thus appear older. Surprisingly, the trick worked, they were allowed into the hall, but McCartney and Harrison were very disappointed with the film, as it turned out to be nothing like what they expected.
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