Word: forded
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Stouffer, basing his article on a nationwide poll taken last summer for the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Republic, cautions against interpreting the findings as evidence of widespread concern about civil liberties. "These opinions do not reflect deep personal anxiety or concern," he says. "The American people do not lie awake nights worrying about either communists or civil liberties...
Blackboard Jungle (M-G-M). "Don't be a hero," says the old teacher (Louis Calhern) to the new teacher (Glenn Ford), "and never turn your back to the class." Ford, an idealistic young man who hopes, as a teacher, to "shape minds, sculpt lives," looks puzzled. He knows that North Manual High School is "the garbage can of the educational system" of the big U.S. city he lives in, but is the situation really as bad as all that? He finds out that...
...black hole of a school room, jampacked with 35 surly inmates, Teacher Ford spends all his energies in the fight to keep the barest sort of order. He humors, scolds, tries to entice interest. No luck. When he dares to discipline, one young hoodlum asks: "You ever try to fight 35 guys at one time, Teach...
...night as Ford leaves school he hears screams from the library, gets there just in time to prevent the rape of a woman teacher by one of the older students. Next day his class gives him the silent treatment. That night, dead beat, he drops in for a drink at a bar near the school, stays for one too many. On the way home he is ambushed in an alley by a gang of boys and badly beaten...
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...