Word: blackboarding
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...review of the motion picture Blackboard Jungle, I am intrigued by the pronouncement that "Louis Calhern captures that special look of secret decay that can come from breathing chalk dust for 30 years [March 21]". While I am considerably short of 30 years in high-school service, I have inhaled a great deal of that insidious white stuff which produces "the secret decay." (Laymen may not know that some times after a concussion of erasers on the blackboard, the familiar mushroom cloud of dust rises high in the air and results in heavy fallout many feet from the point...
...author, who never gives trick photography the impossible task of seeming hilarious all by itself. Instead, photography is always in support of some well though-out gag, reinforcing its humor to give the dividend of trickery. For instance, the narrator lists the subjects of his study on a blackboard, by pointing his finger the writing appearing by itself. But the blackboard gets uppish and keeps listing lecturers along with the other categories of ores and pests. The author's gag and trick photography combine for a laugh, though neither is particularly amusing alone...
...often happens, when the boys in Hollywood get hold of a picture with a message they work so hard on the sermon that they spoil the picture. The Blackboard Jungle could have been a fine movie, but as it stands now it is an uneven one. It has tried just a little too hard both to shock and to preach...
Juvenile delinquency in public schools is an important theme, with great possibilities for dramatic treatment. When The Blackboard Jungle meets this problem directly, in the classroom and playground scenes, the movie is at its best. But when it tries to tie in the marriage problems of teacher Charles Dadier (the class calls him Mr. Daddy-o) with his student nemesis, it loses momentum, and sloshes through several weepy scenes involving his washed-out little wife, played by Anne Francis...
Cinematically, Blackboard Jungle is no great shakes. The camera work is commonplace and the emotional pace limps. The actors do better. Glenn Ford is a believable symbol of two-fisted do-goodism; Louis Calhern captures that special look of secret decay that can come from breathing chalk dust for 30 years. Better still are the students themselves, some of whom were borrowed from their desks in the Los Angeles public school system. The sense of them there in the background has obviously provided a true emotional standard to which the professional actors, notably Sidney Poitier and Vic Morrow, could repair...