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I’m working on a video editing multi-part question and need the explanation and answer to help me learn.Write a 2-page (300-400 word) response based on the prompt provided. No more than 400wordso The responses should be written from the first-person perspective and incorporate yourunique perspectives of the film or episodes. Although these are more informal, yourresponses should be informed by the concepts introduced in your readings and our classdiscussions. The responses are not intended to be film reviews but rather are responsesto aspects of teen media that are repeatedly represented within the weekly screening

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rhey Turned a School Into a Jungle
21
Ihey Turned a School
nto a Jungle!
ow The BlackboardJungle
edefined the Education Crisis
I
in Postwar America
Adam Golub
California State University, Fullerton
In December 1954, Hollywood reporter Erskine Johnson described the main
tieacher character of MGM’s forthcoming film The Blackboard Jungle as a “frustrated
and bloody Mr. Chips.” In Johnson’s syndicated “Stage and Screen” column, he
predicted that the feature film about novice teacher Rick Dadier (Glenn Ford) trying to
connect with unruly vocational school students would leave “shocked faces in movie
audiences.” This shock would result from watching Dadier’s growing aggravation—
‘fa young teacher with ideals who sees all of them destroyed”—as well as the violence
enacted upon him by his “classroom of young hoodlums.'” The film was released in
March 1955, and the columnist was right on both counts. In The Blackboard Jungle,
Dadier is frustrated by unmotivated students, burned-out colleagues, an unsupportive
administration, inadequate school facilities, and an ineffective teacher education
program, which he feels did not prepare him to deal with low-achieving students or
( lassroom discipline. To make matters worse, Dadier’s school is also dangerous: he
rescues a female teacher from an attempted rape by a student in the library; he and a
male colleague are attacked by a teenaged gang in a back alley; and in the climactic
c lassroom scene, he combats a student wielding a switch-blade knife. Throughout the
spring and summer of 1955, The Blackboard Jungle was debated, denounced, banned,
£ nd scapegoated on account of its violent content and its sharp educational critique.
I|or postwar audiences, the tale of Rick Dadier powerfully illuminated two of the most
ressing social issues of the time: juvenile delinquency and the public school crisis.
Today, we seem to have a much more narrow view of the film that so profoundly
s’hocked audiences more than fifty years ago. In our scholarly and popular imagination,
y e tend to recall the bloody Mr. Chips far more than the frustrated one, for The
iackboard Jungle has primarily been studied and remembered as a cultural artifact
f the postwar juvenile delinquency scare. In the 1950s, juvenile delinquency was
|/idely discussed in the United States; commentators typically blamed the perceived
rise in youth criminality on the mass culture industry, which was allegedly inculcating
Moung people with violent notions through comic books, music, and film. A number of
scholars have inscribed The Blackboard Jungle into this specific historical context.^ In
their view. The Blackboard Jungle exemplifies an emergent cinematic genre, known
as the “juvenile delinquency film,” and the controversy surrounding the picture is
lterpreted as an upshot of the mass culture debates—namely, the debate over whether
teenpics” like The Blackboard Jungle were corrupting America’s youth.
Without question. The Blackboard Jungle was absorbed into the moral panic
about youth deviance in the postwar era, but this popular text also resonated with
educational debates of the 1950s. It offered a powerful cinematic image of a broken
public school that complemented popular discourse about the so-called education crisis.^
After World War II, in the shadow of the Cold War, the American public engaged in a
d^eeply critical re-examination of its educational system. This national soul-searching
1. Erskine Johnson, “Stage and Screen,”
Daily News, December 13, 1954, Blackboard
Jungle—publicity file, Margaret Herrick
Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences, Hollywood, Calif (Hereafter
MGM-AMPAS).
2. See, for example, James Gilbert, A
Cycle of Outrage: America s Reaction to
the Juvenile Delinquent (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986); Thomas Doherty,
Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization
of American Movies in the 1950s (Boston:
Unwin Hyman, 1988); Peter Biskind,
Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood
Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the
Fifties (New York: Pantheon, 1983); Mark
Thomas McGee and R.J. Robertson, The
J.D. Films (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland &
Co., 1982); and Leerom Medovoi, Rebels:
Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity
(Durham: Duke Uniersity. Press, 2005).
22
3. To date. Blackboard Jungle scholarship
has by and large neglected to situate the
film in the context of educational history.
In “Imagined Authority: Blackboard
Jungle and the Project of Educational
Liberalism,” Daniel Perlstein argues that
the film addresses broader social anxieties
over the ability of the school, “and the
state more broadly,” to “simultaneously
insure individual freedom and contain
social conflicts.” Perlstein discusses the
film’s narrative and visual technique in
tandem with its popular reception, and
incisively suggests that a careñil study of
The Blackboard Jungle can reveal much
about the cultural conflicts that pervaded
postwar American society. He ultimately
reads the film as an articulation of the social
ambiguities surrounding male and state
authority in the 1950s. In the final analysis,
however, Perlstein is studying the school as
an institutional arm of state power, a move
that inadvertently detaches the school from
its more immediate educational context—
the postwar school crisis. Daniel Perlstein,
“Imagined Authority: Blackboard Jungle
and the Project of Educational Liberalism,”
Paedogogica Histórica 36:1 (2000): 407424.
4. Benjamin Fine, The Crisis in American
Education: A Reprint of Twelve Articles
from the New York Times (New York:
1947), 4.
5. G.H. Henry, “What’s Wrong With High
School?” Ladies Home Journal, January
1947, 28-9+; “U.S. Schools: They Face a
Crisis,” Life, 29:16 (October 16, 1950);
“The Public School Crisis,” Saturday
Review of Literature, September 1951, 7.
6. Mortimer Smith, And Madly Teach:
A Layman Looks at Public Education
(Chicago: Regnery, 1949); Arthur Bestor,
Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from
Learning in Our Public Schools (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1953); Rudolf
Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read and What
You Can Do About It (New York: Harper,
1955); Albert Lynd, Quackery in the Public
Schools (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953).
7. Winfield Scott and Clyde M. Hill, eds..
Public Education Under Criticism (New
York: Prentice-Hall, 1954), 3. According to
educational historian Herbert Kliebard, “the
decade of the 1950s became a period of
criticism of American education unequalled
in modem times.” The Struggle for the
American Curriculum, 1893-1958, 2nd ed.
(New York: Routledge, 1995), 222.
Education • Film & History, Volume 39.1
uncovered a massive teacher shortage and an alarming lack of classroom space, sparking
lively debates over educational philosophy. The idea that schools were in “crisis” first
became conventional wisdom in the media in the late 1940s and continued throughout
the 1950s. In 1947, for example. The New York Times published a widely discussed
series on the “Crisis in Education.” Based on a six-month survey of public schools, the
exposé announced that the nation’s educational outlook was “not a pretty one.” The
twelve-part series combined statistics and first-hand reports to paint a harrowing picture
of postwar schools: Seventy thousand teaching positions remained unfilled; one out of
seven teachers served on an emergency or substandard certificate; six thousand schools
would have to close because of lack of teachers; school buildings across the nation
were in deplorable states; curricula and teaching methods were woefully outdated; and
teacher morale had dropped to a new low.” A number of U.S. magazines also began to
register the swelling public concern. In 1947, The Ladies Home Journal asked “What’s
Wrong with High School?” while in 1950, Life magazine proclaimed “U.S. Schools:
They Face a Crisis,” and in 1951 The Saturday Review of Literature ran a story on
“The Public School Crisis.”‘ Along similar lines, an array of books that tendered harsh
criticisms of the nation’s schools were published throughout the postwar era, with
provocative titles like And Madly Teach, Educational Wastelands, Why Johnny Can’t
Read, and Quackery in the Public Schools.^ “Criticisms have mushroomed to alarming
proportions,” wrote the editors of Public Education Under Criticism, a 1954 anthology
of recent media commentary on schools. In the editors’ estimate, criticism of education
had established “new records for volume, breadth of coverage, and intensity.'” Without
question, the cultural climate of mid-century America was ripe for stories that would
fiirther expose the shortcomings of the educational system, and The Blackboard Jungle
tapped into this school panic just as much as it fueled the juvenile delinquency scare.
. This essay aims to explain the historical significance of The Blackboard Jungle
more completely by locating it within the milieu of the postwar school crisis and
showing how the film dramatically shaped the terms of public debate about education.
In what follows, I recount the processes of cultural production and reception that
determined the various meanings that Americans attached to The Blackboard Jungle in
the 1950s. In terms of methodology, I am less concerned with offering textual analysis
and more focused on constructing a cultural history of thefilm.*I loosely organize this
history around two themes that refiect the interpretive frameworks that were applied
to The Blackboard Jungle by contemporaries. Generally speaking, the story was
understood either as a sociological document that realistically depicted the problems
facing U.S. schools, or as an irresponsible exaggeration that exploited social anxieties
about youth and schooling. In short, the cultural conversation turned on whether The
Blackboard Jungle was a work of sociology or sensationalism—a work of fact or
fiction. Ultimately, the controversy generated by this motion picture effectively blurred
the boundaries between these two categories, and, in the process, transformed what the
“education crisis” meant in the postwar United States.
The Nightmarish hut Authentic Novel
Author Evan Hunter originally conceived of the plot of the Blackboard Jungle in
his 1954 novel by the same name, and it remained virtually unchanged on screen. The
Blackboard Jungle tells the story of Rick Dadier, an army veteran and recent college
graduate who lands his first teaching job at an urban vocational high school called
North Manual Trades. His’ all-male, racially diverse students are unmotivated and
disrespectful, mockingly calling him “Daddy-0” on the first day of class and asking,
“Hey teach, you ever try to fight thirty-five guys at once?” One cynical older teacher
tells Dadier that Manual Trades is the “garbage can of the education system,” and
their job as teachers is simply to sit on top of the lid. Dadier’s idealism and mettle are
They Turned a School Into a Jungle
quickly tested after he rescues a fellow teacher, Lois Hammond, from an attempted
rape in the school library; he is subsequently attacked by a group of students upset by
his heroics. The novice teacher struggles with thoughts of quitting, but he needs the
job to support his pregnant wife. Moreover, he is determined to try to help his students,
and in particular he reaches out to Gregory Miller (Sidney Poitier), one of his African
American pupils who is considering dropping out. The final scene pits Dadier in a
classroom fight against an armed student. To Rick’s surprise, the other students, lead
by Miller, intervene and end up restraining the troublemaker by pinning him against
the chalkboard with an American fiagpole. This show of loyalty inspires Dadier, and
he and Miller both agree not to give up on the school.
Though not strictly autobiographical, The Blackboard Jungle is based on author
Evan Hunter’s experience as an English teacher at Bronx Vocational High School
(BVHS) in New York City. Hunter taught at the school in the fall of 1950. He had
just graduated from college the previous June with the help of the G.I. Bill, earning
honors in English and a minor in education. The BVHS job was a substitute position
acquired with an emergency license; Hunter’s only previous experience consisted of
one semester of supervised student teaching at another vocational school while he was
still an undergraduate. By his own accounts. Hunter found teaching both challenging
and deeply disheartening, and he was “shocked” by the vocational school situation.
He recalled how absolute “disorder” began the moment he came into school, and “it
did not end until I went home at the end of the day.”‘ He had one student who could
not write his name, and many more students who could not read a single word. Hunter
himself never experienced the violence that the novel’s protagonist encounters, but he
claimed such incidents were all “within the realm of realistic plausibility” and were not
“unheard of in many vocational high schools.”‘” In short. Hunter very much wanted
his novel to be viewed as a mirror of the actual conditions in many urban schools. If
his book seized on the view that America’s schools were in crisis, it was only because
the former teacher felt that this perception was accurate. In fact, when brainstorming
titles for the novel. Hunter playfially suggested to his publisher that it be called “THE
VOCATIONAL SCHOOL PROBLEM IN NEW YORK CITY AND THE VALIANT
FIGHT OF ONE MAN AGAINST IT IN AN ATTEMPT TO SOLVE IT.””
With a much abbreviated and far more catchy title. The Blackboard Jungle
was published by Simon and Schuster in October 1954. Hunter’s novel was first and
foremost promoted as an important sociological exposé of the school system.’^ As
part of its publicity campaign, Simon and Schuster took out full-page print ads in The
New York Times Book Review, likening The Blackboard Jungle to other novels that
had “opened fire on major problems,” such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Grapes of
Wrath.’-‘ Reviewers similarly characterized Hunter’s work as a sociological novel that
dealt with pressing educational issues. One critic even compared The Blackboard Jungle
to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle for its potential to spur social reform; in this case, as a
prod to improve the vocational school system. Time aftirmed that Hunter had written
a “nightmarish but authentic” novel “about the problem that should scare the curls off
mothers’ heads and drive the most carpet-slippered father to vigilant attendance at the
P.T.A.” The Nation credited Hunter for “[breaking] through the verbiage which has
long clouded the facts of vocational teaching.” The New York Times Book Review went
so far as to compare The Blackboard Jungle and its treatment of the vocational high
school to a “monograph on the subject put out by the National Education Association,”
adding that “nothing that could conceivably be said about vocational high schools has
been left out.” A critic in the Saturday Review of Literature, who happened to be a
pormer teacher, testified that the story was “the most realistic account I have ever read
of life in a New York City vocational high school.'”” By and large, the print version of
Blackboard Jungle was interpreted as an important, realistic, inspiring story that
addressed challenging educational issues.
23
8. Several scholars have offered a textual
analysis of the film, employing cultural
theory to read its ideological content in
terms of race, gender, and power dynamics.
See Leerom Medovoi, “Reading the
Blackboard: Youth, Masculinity, and Racial
Cross-Identification,” in Harry Stecopoulos
and Michael Uebel, eds.. Race and the
Subject of Masculinities (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1997) and Beth
McCoy, “Manager, Buddy, Delinquent:
Blackboard Jungle’s Desegregating
Triangle,” Cinema Journal 3SA (1998):
25-39.
9. Evan Hunter to Ephraim London, n.d.,
Box 19, Evan Hunter Papers, Special
Collections, Mugar Library, Boston
University, Brookline, Mass. (Hereafter
EH-BU).
10. Hunter to Scharf, January 22, 1955,
Box 26, EH-BU.
11. Hunter to Peter Schwed, November 29,
1953, Box 19, EH-BU.
12. The novel was simultaneously
published as a condensation in the October
1954 Ladies Home Journal for a special
issue on education; the magazine’s cover
asked readers, “What Do We Want Of Our
Schools?”
13. Advertisement featured in The New
York Times Book Review, October 10, 1954,
Box 121, EH-BU.
14. Review of The Blackboard Jungle, The
New York Times, n.d.. Box 121, EH-BU;
Review of The Blackboard Jungle, Time,
October 11, 1954, 134; Stanley Cooperman,
“Violence in Harlem,” The Nation,
December 4, 1954, 493; Gilbert Millstein,
“Teacher’s Ordeal,” The New York Times
Book Review, October 24, 1954, 43; Nathan
Rothman, review of The Blackboard Jungle,
Saturday Review of Literature, October 9,
1954, 16.
24
Education • Film «& History, Volume 39.1
The Dramatized Documentary
15. HuntertoGertrudeAlper, April 17,
1954, Box 25, EH-BU.
16. Juvenile Delinquency file #1 and
#2, Richard Brooks Papers, Special
Collections, Margaret Herrick Library,
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, Hollywood, Calif. (Hereafter
RB-AMPAS). File #1 includes a three-page
typed bibliography of sources consulted by
Brooks.
17. Erskine Johnson, “Stage and Screen,”
Daily News, December 13, 1954,
Blackboard Jungle—publicity file, MGMAMPAS.
18. Untitled typed statement by Richard
Brooks, n.d.. Blackboard Junglemiscellaneous file, RB-AMPAS.
19. Blackboard Jungle—breakdown,
MGM-AMPAS.
20. Al Altman to Pandro Berman, October
21, 1954, Box 16, MGM Turner Script
Collection, Margaret Herrick Library,
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, Hollywood, California (hereafter
MGM-AMPAS). Steve McQueen was
originally considered for the role of West;
correspondence between the casting
director in New York and MGM in
Hollywood noted that McQueen had not
attended vocational school and did not
come across as an “authentic vocational
school slum type.” See also “Talent Hunt:
Comparative Unknowns Cast in New
Movie,” New York Times, March 6, 1955,
BJ-AMPAS.
Three film studios expressed interest in buying the motion picture rights to
Hunter’s story, and Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) closed the deal in April 1954.” By
the time the book was published, the movie was already in production. At the helm was
director and screenwriter Richard Brooks. Brooks took great pains to create a film that
would faithfully reflect the sociological quality of Hunter’s novel. For example, when
writing the screenplay, he consulted a range of media reports on progressive education,
vocational schooling, and youth culture. His sources included a 1954 Collier’s series
on the school crisis, a Eos Angeles Times article about the high number of unqualified
teachers working in California schools, and a New York Times report stating that U.S.
public schools were in peril because of overcrowded classrooms, financial neglect,
and low teacher morale.’* By conducting such careful research. Brooks wanted to
emphasize that his film was not “something Hollywood dreamed up. The situation
exists.”” In fact. Brooks claimed to be surprised by the controversy surrounding his
final product given the fact that the national media had already been running so many
stories on youth deviance and the education crisis: “a good portion of the film… deals
with the same facts printed by these outstanding periodicals. [It] dramatizes the same
incidents.'”*
Brooks also pored over Hunter’s novel (he only had the publisher’s galleys at
the time he penned the screenplay) and made detailed notes about scenes he found
especially compelling. Many of these scenes related to Dadier’s exasperation with a
public school system that failed its neediest students. Remarking on a section in the
novel in which Dadier reflects on the valuable role vocational schools play in a society
that is supposedly committed to mass public education—and the importance of staffing
them with good teachers—Brooks wrote, “This is an important chapter… a method must
be devised for dramatizing through action the information contained in this chapter.”
Brooks also clipped a sheet to his treatment that included a list of the relative earnings
of different professions in the United States; the list showed that the average salary
of a high school teacher in California was $3990 a year, whereas policemen earned
$5280, congressmen $12,500, and U.S. district judges $15,000. Brooks calculated that
a teacher’s salary worked out to be $2.50 an hour, and he jotted on the list that baby
sitters and soda jerks earned more.” A scene was subsequently included in the script
that has a perturbed Dadier reading this list of salaries out loud to a fellow teacher.
Brooks’s efforts in pre-production strongly suggest that he was trying to construct a
film that accurately and sympathetically depicted the frustrations of teaching.
Yet another way that MGM tried to recreate the realistic aspects of the novel
was through its casting. Casting for The Blackboard Jungle was done in New York
City, and many of the young men who appeared in supporting roles had no previous
acting experience. A good number of them, however, had actually attended vocational
school—one had even been in reform school—and this background was deemed more
important to Brooks and his casting director than an acting résumé. In fact, Vic Morrow,
who played Dadier’s nemesis in the classroom, Artie West, attended vocational school
but had no film or television experience.^”
Brooks thus tried to shape the film using images and ideas already circulating
in popular discourse about education, and he apparently did so with a great deal
of compassion for the teaching profession. Moreover, he made a point to cast real
vocational school students to play Dadier’s pupils. To what extent, then, might The
Blackboard Jungle have seemed realistic to postwar audiences? Comments culled
from preview screenings in February 1955 provide a window onto how the viewing
public may have positioned The Blackboard Jungle within the context of contemporary
educational debates. One audience member called the film “very timely” because it
dealt with a situation “very much alive at this time.” She added, “I wish that it will
bring a better understanding of teachers’ problems.” Another viewer suggested that
They Turned a School Into a Jungle
25
the movie “helps us understand the school problem.” Still another attendee thought it
‘I’very informative on school conditions in many areas.” One patron requested that the
studio “make more films that contain equal acting and support of public moral needs.”
Other commentators found the film “educational” and believed “it has a lot to teach
the public.”^’ One theater owner who hosted a sneak preview wrote MGM to report
that he had collected a record number of comment cards that were overwhelmingly
positive. He declared that The Blackboard Jungle possessed “undoubtedly great box
office potential as dramatized documentary with headline exploitation.”^^
21. Comments from “First Preview:
First Report,” Encino Theatre, Encino,
California, February 2, 1955, and “Preview
Survey: Research Study Conducted
by Film Research Surveys,” Loew’s
Lexington Theater, New York City,
February 7, 955, BlackboardJtinglepreviews file, MGM-AMPAS.
Such comments by test audiences must have bolstered MGM’s belief that its
film had succeeded in capturing the sociological aspects of Hunter’s novel and could
potentially spark public dialogue about school reform upon its release in theaters.
While the motion picture was still in production, one executive even assured a New
York theater manager, “I think Blackboard Jungle will alert many people all over the
country in making sure that schools like that shown in Blackboard Jungle will cease
0 exist.””
22. Howard Strickling to Howard Dietz,
February 3, 955, Blackboard Junglecorrespondence file, MCM-AMPAS.
23. Dore Schary to Howard Dietz,
November 22, 1954, Blackboard Jungleproduction file, MGM-AMPAS.
The Drama of Teen-Age Terror
Unfortunately, production efforts that sought to mold The Blackboard Jungle into
c n important message picture were compromised by MGM’s own marketing strategies.
On marquees across the nation, the motion picture was billed as MGM’s “Drama of
“^”een-Age Terror!” Movie trailers for the film described it as “fiction torn from big
c ity, modem savagery,” promising a “brass-knuckle punch in its startling revelation
c f those teen-age savages who turn big city schools into a clawing jungle.”^” Radio
I lugs featured music from the film, playing Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around
tie Clock,” while an announcer intoned that the “violent” music fit the “explosive
screenplay.”” The MGM campaign included an enormous promotional float that
c rove around New York City; sitting atop the float was a menacing-looking young
man cleaning his fingernails with a switchblade.^* One Loew’s Theater newspaper
advertisement, which depicted a female teacher confi-onted by a glowering student,
read, “She was a teacher who was indiscreet enough to wear a tight skirt! What
happened then could only happen in this big-city school where tough teen-agers ran
wild!” Another ad showed a male teacher being choked by a student, with the caption,
‘JThey Turned a School Into a Jungle!” Other ads blared, “They brought their jungle
ciode into the school!” and “The kid with the switchblade knife!”” MGM’s approach
to the film was a far cry from Simon and Schuster’s efforts to market Hunter’s novel
as a sociological exposé on par with Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Movie reviews similarly focused on the more sensatiorial aspects of the film. For
ample, a headline in the Los Angeles Times announced, “Teen-age Rebels Shock in
‘Blackboard Jungle.'” The critic then called the motion picture a “primer in violence”
tliat was “murderously good.” Headlines for other film reviews proclaimed, “Movie
Tackles Teen-Age School Terror,” “Bad Boys in the Schoolroom,” and “Schoolroom
Terrorism.”-^* Notably, not one single headline shouted, “A Tribute to the Teaching
Profession!” However, even as they boasted of the film’s sensational violence, many
reviewers still tried to acknowledge its sociological worth. One critic maintained that
me Blackboard Jungle had “a moral and a purpose,” while another described it as
“realistically scripted.” Yet another reviewer suggested that the motion picture had a
“documentary effect and is most electrifying when one considers that the situations
depicted do exist.”^’ One writer echoed this sentiment, stating, “In a physical and
photographic sense. Blackboard Jungle is almost documentary in its raw and vivid
realism.”^” The Los Angeles Times conveniently summed up the film as both sociology
and sensationalism, claiming that the production “is stunning in its impact—probably
too stunning, in its violent excesses, to move the onlooker to any emotion softer
24. “Blackboard Jungle” (Teaser Trailer),
Dialogue Cutting Continuity, March 10,
1955, file B1695, MGM-AMPAS.
25. Radio spot described in letter, Scott
Meredith to Hunter, March 16, 1955, Box
26. EH-BU.
26. Advertisements featured in Daily
News (New York), March 18 and 16, 1955.
Float described in letter, Scott Meredith
to Evan Hunter, March 15, 1955, Box 26,
EH-BU.
27. The Daily News, March 13, March 18,
and March 16, 1955, Box 121, EH-BU.
28. “Teen-age Rebels Shock in
‘Blackboard Jungle,”‘ Los Angeles Times,
May 12, 1955; “A Movie Tackles Teen-age
School Terror,” Look, May 3, 1955; “Bad
Boys in the Schoolroom,’,’ Life, March 28,
1955; “Schoolroom Terrorism,” Pix, May
21, 1955, BJ-AMPAS.
29. Dick Williams, “‘Blackboard Jungle’
is Frank Shocker,” Mirror-News, May
12, 1955; “Hard-Hitting Drama,” New
York Journal American, March 21, 1955;
“‘Blackboard Jungle’ May Shock But
Won’t Bore,” New York Daily Mirror,
March 21, 1955. All clippings BJ-AMPAS.
26
30. Review of The Blackboard Jungle,
Cue, March 19, 1955, BJ-AMPAS.
Emphasis mine.
31. Philip K. Scheuer, “Impact of
‘Blackboard Jungle’ Stunning—Maybe
Too Much So,” Los Angeles Times, March
6, 1955, BJ-AMPAS.
32. ‘”Blackboard Jungle’—True or
False?” Variety (weekly), March 23, 1955;
“The Exception or the Rule,” New York
Times, March 27, 1955, BJ-AMPAS.
33. Ruth Goldstein, review of The
Blackboard Jungle, High Points in the
Work of the High Schools of New York
y, 37:5 (May 1955), 59.
34. Franklin J. Keller, “Jungle Jottings,”
High Points in the Work of the High
Schools of New York City, 37:1 (January
1955), 8.
35. Our Town’s Teachers:
Jungle?’ New York Post, May 5, 1955,
BJ-AMPAS; Sam Levenson, “Teachers
and The Blackboard Jungle,” High Points
in the Work of the High Schools of New
York City, 37:6 (June 1955), 33; “What’s
Happening in Education?” National
Parent-Teacher, May 1955, 15; “‘Jungle
Tempest,”‘ The New York Times, April 3,
1955, BJ-AMPAS.
36. “Pedagogs [i/c] Pummel
‘Blackboard’; Hits Teacher Prestige,”
Kaneiy (weekly), 13 July 1955,
BJ-AMPAS; “Divided Views on
‘Blackboard,'” f^nefy (weekly), 20 April
1955,BJ-AMPAS; “What’s Happening
in Education?” National Parent-Teacher,
May 1955, p. 15; “Schary Accuses
Educators of’Shocking Disregard of
Facts’ in ‘Jungle’ Attack,” Variety (daily),
September 1, 1955, BJ-AMPAS.
Education Film & History, Volume 39.1
than horror and revulsion, or to allow him to rationalize it completely afterward.
Nevertheless, these things have happened, are happening, somewhere, every day.”^’
The response of film critics to The Blackboard Jungle shows how difficult it
may have been for postwar audiences to neatly categorize the story of North Manual
Trades High School. It was a “primer in violence,” yet it had a “moral and a purpose.”
It realistically depicted situations that “do exist,” but this depiction was simultaneously
“too stunning” to engender any kind of “rational” response from filmgoers. The
Blackboard Jungle was at once documentary-like and “murderously good.” The mass
media propagated these seemingly contradictory readings of the film, even while
reporting enthusiastically on the trouble audiences were having interpreting the film.
One headline in Variety, for example, asked, “‘Blackboard Jungle’—True or False?
Educators Apparently Uncertain Whether to See Reality or Caricature.” In like manner,
The New York Times ran a piece titled, “The Exception or the Rule?”” As it turns
out, this popular story did not fit easily into one category or the other. In fact. The
Blackboard Jungle in many ways collapsed the distinction between fact and fiction,
reality and caricature, and sociology and sensationalism. In the words of one teacher,
who reviewed the film for a New York City teachers’ newsletter, “It is clear that there
is a small hard core of truth in it all, but it is not this truth, seen this way, told with
this effect!”” Another educator remarked that The Blackboard Jungle was “‘merely a
mirror’ of violence and disintegration, and false at that.”^” A false mirror? Truth, but
not this truth? In the wake of the film version, audience response to The Blackboard
Jungle was increasingly characterized by such dissonance. Educators, in particular, did
not seem to know what to make of the motion picture.
Evan Hunter had been challenged to a public debate by a New York City school
principal shortly after his book appeared, and the administrators at Bronx Vocational
High School (BVHS) were further outraged by the film version, which they saw as a
thinly veiled portrayal of their institution. The city’s board of education even sent the
principal of BVHS to Hollywood to offer MGM recommendations for revising the
film version of the story while it was in production. MGM demurred, and the principal
proclaimed The Blackboard Jungle a “libel” against the students and the teachers of
New York City’s vocational high schools. A New York Post survey of local teachers
found that a “great many” of them regarded the film as “gross exaggeration and bad
art.” One former New York City teacher suggested to Hunter that “the ‘jungle’ you
refer to is in your own mind.” After the film was released, the superintendent of New
York City schools went on the air over the board of education radio station to “correct
the impressions” left by the motion picture. In a letter to the New York Times, a New
York City school principal expressed grave concern about the film’s “probable effects
upon the public attitude towards the students and teachers.””
Such controversy was not just confined to New York City educators. Delegates
to the National Education Association (NEA) annual convention in 1955 denounced
the film. At the conference, one assistant superintendent called The Blackboard Jungle
“harmful” because it encouraged delinquency, portrayed vocational schools as havens
for “dummies and undesirables,” and scared people away from teaching “at a time
wh