Word: chalkings
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
Your Cinema reviewer owes apologies to the hundreds of thousands of dedicated public-school teachers who plan to go on "breathing chalk dust for 30 years...
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...
...more material world, for a long time to come, will use atoms mainly to generate electric power. Operation of an atomic reactor at Chalk River in Canada established the essential safety of an atomic power plant. When the reactor, one day, ran out of control it merely grew hot enough to melt tons of metal, without causing a catastrophic explosion...
Shahn was raised in a Brooklyn slum, where the local toughs forced him to portray favorite athletes on the pavement with chalk. Little Ben learned to draw very well indeed. He also developed a temper. It was the perfect schooling for a "proletarian-school" painter. Shahn grew up to startle the art world with a series of watercolors, almost as beautiful as they were bitter, based on the Sacco-Vanzetti case. He became perhaps the best, and most depressing, painter of the Great Depression. Shahn's "havenots" were lean as greyhounds and sad-eyed as spaniels; his "haves" always...