Blackboard Jungle turns 70

by Susan King  

Clare Booth Luce was angry. The ultra-conservative Luce, who was best known as the playwright of the 1936 hit Broadway play “The Women,” was the ambassador to Italy in 1955. And she was throwing her weight around trying to prevent Richard Brooks’ “Blackboard Jungle” from screening in Europe.  

Remember this was 1955 and life in America was supposed to be happy, picture-perfect. Dwight Eisenhower — “I like Ike” — was the president. The wholesome “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” and “Father Knows Best” were popular family comedy series. Problems were easily solvable. But there was a dark underbelly. Careers and lives were destroyed due to the blacklist with Senator Joe McCarthy savagely rooting out those whom he thought were Communists. Segregation was still rampant with 14-year-old Emmett Till’s murder in Mississippi on August 28, 1955, shocking the nation, while less than four months later, Rosa Parks, who would be honored by the Congress as “the first lady of civil rights,” made headlines when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus to a white woman.  

“Blackboard Jungle,” based on Evan Hunter’s 1954 book, sparked controversy as soon as it opened on March 25, 1955. Far from the image of bobby sox, poodle skirts and crew cuts, the New York inner-city vocational high school depicted in the drama was brutal and violent. The diverse student body used intimidation, fists and switchblades to communicate; teachers were threatened daily. And then there was the theme song Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” — which ended up being one of the top singles of the year and according to TCM.com, “played an important part in expanding the rock and roll market… MGM purchased limited rights to the song from Decca Records for $5,000.” 

Even before the title tune there was a written introduction: “We, in the United States, are fortunate to have a school system that is a tribute to our communication and our faith in American youth. Today we are concerned with juvenile delinquency — its causes and its effects. We are especially concerned when this delinquency boils over into our schools. The scenes and incidents depicted here are fictional. However, we believe that public awareness is a first step toward a remedy for any problem. It is in this spirit and with this faith that ‘Blackboard Jungle’ was produced.” 

Which brings us back to Ms. Luce, who raised enough of a fuss that ‘Blackboard Jungle” was prevented from screening at the Venice Film Festival. She proclaimed that if she saw the film that she would be “giving ammunition to Italian Communist and anti-U.S. propaganda.” 

Sidney Poitier, who played a bright, sensitive troubled student in the film, told the Los  Angeles Times in 1991, “that picture has kind of carved a little place for itself in the consciousness.” And he still mused over the fact that Luce didn’t want the movie released in Europe. “The school systems in many urban areas were as bad as the circumstances in the film. We were just not accustomed in America to deal with tough social questions. The question of race was avoided altogether. The word ‘damn’ was not allowed in the film. In such a mind-set, a film like ‘Blackboard Jungle’ could be considered controversial, but had to be considered sufficient to have a U.S. ambassador recommend that it be censored or denied exposure?” 

(Twelve years later, Poitier would be teaching difficult British high school students in “To Sir, With Love.”) 

The New York Times reviewer had a hard time believing what he was seeing on the screen was true. “It gives a blood-curdling, nightmarish picture of monstrous disorder in a public school. And it leaves one wondering wildly whether such out-of-hand horrors can be.” The Times even worried about the safety of the case stating that Brooks, “puts his principal actors through paces that would seem to leave them permanently marred and scarred.” 

Besides Poitier, “Blackboard Jungle” stars Glenn Ford as the new teacher Richard Dadier, Anne Francis as his wife, Vic Morrow as the most violent of the students, Paul Mazursky, who would become a top writer/director, and Jameel Farah, best known as Jamie Farr of “MASH” fame.  

Despite all the controversy and negative publicity, “Blackboard Jungle” made $5.3 million in North America and earned four Oscar nominations including best screenplay for Brooks. He was also nominated for a DGA and WGA Awards. “Blackboard Jungle” was named to the National Film Registry in 2016.

“Blackboard Jungle” was perhaps a sign of the changing times and public interest in picture-perfect entertainment. Seven months later, audiences were in for another shock with Nick Ray’s “Rebel Without a Cause” starring James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo which examined the problems of upper-class students and their families or, as the New York Times described, an “excessively graphic exercise.”

---

Susan King was a film/TV/theater writer at the Los Angeles Times for 26 years specializing in Classic Hollywood.