April 9, 2024: I Am AmericanStudying Sidney Poitier: The Blackboard Jungle

[Thiscoming weekend marks the 60thanniversary of Sidney Poitier becoming the first Black actor to win a Best Actor Oscar.So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of Poitier performances, leading upto a special post on a handful of 21C actors carrying his legacy forward!]

On twovery similar characters, and one important distinction.

Five yearsafter his debut performance as the lead of the film I highlighted yesterday, 1950’s No Way Out, Sidney Poitier took on a more supporting but stillvery significant role in The Blackboard Jungle (1955).Based on EvanHunter’s semi-autobiographical 1954 novel, The Blackboard Jungle isthe story of a young WWII veteran turned high school English teacher, Glenn Ford’s Richard Dadier,who seeks to get through to the troubled students at an urban, integrated tradeschool. While the story seems initially focused on Dadier and his adultrelationships, including with his pregnant wife (played by Anne Francis) andtwo fellow teachers (Richard Kiley and Margaret Hayes), it is graduallydominated by Poitier’s star-making performance as Gregory Miller, a rebellious leaderof the students and apparent adversary to Dadier’s authority. But when herecognizes Miller’s intelligence and talents (including as a musician) andtreats him with respect, Dadier is able to make Miller an ally instead, and(having pledged not to quit as long as the other doesn’t either) together theyhelp turn the classroom around.

If thatteacher-student dynamic seems familiar to modern audiences unfamiliar with Blackboard Jungle, I’d argue a mainreason might be that it closely parallels the evolving central relationship inanother, more recent film set in an urban high school: between Los Angeles highschool math teacher Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos) and troubled buttalented student AngelGuzman (Lou Diamond Phillips) in Stand and Deliver(1988). Like Guzman in Stand and Deliver,Poitier’s Miller is at least loosely connected to a gang, which in Blackboard is led by class bully Artie West (Vic Morrow).But as that hyperlinked scene reflects for the relationship between Miller andWest, in both of these stories the potential student leader is far less violentand far more open to the teacher’s positive influences than is the gang leadercharacter. Indeed, just as Poitier’s Miller is revealed to have musical talentsthat could take him very far if he gets the chance to pursue them, Phillips’Guzman turns out to be one of the best and smartest students in Escalanate’s class,scoring a perfect 5 on the AP Calculus exam.

So thereare clear and compelling similarities between these two youthful characters andtheir roles in their respective films. But there’s also a significantdifference, and it’s one that I’d argue reflects the films’ respective timeperiods and historical contexts: Blackboard’stwo central characters are distinct in race/ethnicity (Ford’s Dadier is white,while of course Poitier’s Miller is African American), while Stand’s are both Mexican American. In a pivotal scene in Stand, Escalante is accused ofhelping his students cheat on the AP exam, and rightly sees the accusation asracist stereotyping of himself as well as his students, attitudes which alsoseem connected to 1970s-80sattacks on affirmative action. Blackboard,on the other hand, is quite specifically a story about integration in public education,one not coincidentally released just a year after the Supreme Court’s landmark decisionin Brownv. Board of Education (1954). As we’ll see throughout this week’sseries, Poitier was consistently part of such Civil Rights-era films andthemes, and despite its familiar overall genre Blackboard Jungle can’t be separated from those contexts.

NextPoitier post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other Poitier films you’d highlight?