Through a Glass Darkly

Blackboard Jungle (1955): An idealistic war veteran-turned-schoolteacher (Glenn Ford) takes work at a vocational school in inner-city New York. His class of teenage boys is dysfunctional and violent: on his first day, a student pelts a baseball at his head, and he prevents a rape in the library after-hours. The older faculty seem resigned to let this situation continue. On the school’s halls are hung army recruitment posters. 

The film is mostly recognized today as a relic of 1950s American anxiety about juvenile delinquency. However, as the director-writer himself stated, its point is not really an exploitation of social issues, nor a documentary look at inner-city schools (the exteriors are filmed on MGM’s backlot) as it was received at the time. At its core, it is simply a well-filmed play about a man trying to bring knowledge to a resistant mob. (The numerous allusions to Christ made throughout the film aren’t a coincidence.) Richard Brooks, who began in the theatre like many good Hollywood directors of that time, brings out the excellence of his actors with blocking, framing, and camera movement that is always finely tuned to the emotional gridlock and power dynamics between adults and youth. For the most part, it’s good drama, although at times the filmmakers’ keen civic conscience does becomes too visible and results in preachiness. The climax sees one of the delinquent students incapacitated by a classmate jousting an American flagpole against their chest. There is little sarcasm to be found in this moment, that’s just how the movie is. The anarchic energy of Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” played over the opening credits announces a more subversive film that never really arrives.

Score: 3/5

Something quite different from Brooks’ Hollywood stylization is Der Lehrerzimmer (2023), which was nominated for the Best International Language Film Oscar. As opposed to the transparent, "democratic" mise-en-scene of classical Hollywood, this director has opted for a suffocatingly parochial visual combo of a 1.35 aspect ratio and shallow depth of field. Blackboard Jungle depicts its environment as a literal battlefield, while Der Lehrerzimmer, with a touch of Kafka, depicts public school as a bureaucratic nightmare creating blind abuse and pain between student, parents, and teachers. 

A wave of unsolved thefts is being investigated by the faculty at a German public school. One young teacher, taking matters into her own hands, secretly records her unattended jacket in the teachers’ lounge to catch the thief. She gets what appears to be the blouse sleeve of a front-office lady rifling through her belongings. However, the woman's face is not shown in the footage, and due to several strategic blunders by the faculty she is able to deny culpability and press charges against the school. At stake in the ensuing conflict is the ruin of the young teacher and the accused woman’s bright young son, Oscar, who is in the teacher’s class and whose mind is unsettled by the whole affair.

To me the film has three glaring issues. The first is a lack of visual imagination. The second is the lack of transcendence in the story: the director, wanting to avoid sensationalist cliché, makes the film’s crisis rather humdrum. I don't see why this can't be a valid idea, but here it does not come off successfully, and the film has a bit of a ‘so what’ feeling. By the end – spoilers – the kid has to switch schools and maybe there’s a lawsuit incoming. Big deal. Thirdly, the modernist soundtrack is overused as a crutch. I was reminded of fellow German Edward Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which also overuses its soundtrack to give a sense of dramatic unity that isn’t really there.

Score: 2/5