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Nothing ages quite as quick as a mainstream Hollywood film about hot button social issues. Look no further than Blackboard Jungle, which reimagines an inner-city high school as a war zone of rapist students, gang violence, and a Molotov cocktail waiting to be thrown. Brute Force: Junior Edition, essentially.
These overly pious lecterns desperately try to underscore the sincerity and rational of outdated social mores by cranking the problems in question to absurdist levels. As though the obsolete generation wanted to take the younger to task by imagining an entire Eisenhower generation as murderous, drug addicted thugs and wondering where it all went wrong while absolving themselves of the culpability in the creation of these problems. Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme.
Glenn Ford’s idealist/former military man teacher inadvertently stirs up racial discord when he tries to help Sidney Poitier’s musical prodigy in the making. That most of these bad kids are clearly rushing towards 30 almost makes Blackboard Jungle work as camp. There’s only one reason to sit through this slog and that’s to watch Poitier’s star-in-the-making turn scald the screen and threaten to upend everything. He’s dynamite in this screed of a message movie about juvenile delinquency.
