Up the Down Staircase (1967)

Sylvia Barrett (Sandy Dennis) is a new English teacher at the rundown Calvin Coolidge High School. She is a fish out of water and even goes up the down staircase on her first day. She struggles in the overcrowded classes without much supplies or any help. Sylvia struggles against the bureaucracy, overwhelming odds, and indifference.Sandy Dennis is great and it's got the grittiness of a tough school. It came out around the same time as "To Sir, With Love" with Sidney Poitier and is generally overshadowed by it. It has neither the iconic song nor an iconic star. It is a good modern school drama that fits into the standard formula. This may have set the formula itself and it gets the chaotic classroom right. The scene that sold me is Mr. Barringer unwittingly critiquing Alice's love letter. It's an amazing scene. This is all very good.

Next to her Oscar winning role in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, Sandy Dennis is probably most identified with her role as newly minted school teacher starting in the fictitious, but oh so typical Calvin Coolidge High School in a really bad neighborhood in New York City. These films on schools from The Blackboard Jungle to Dangerous Minds really are just about the same. That's because the problems of growing up never really change, just sometime how we and those around us cope with it.I well remember in my high school years the best teachers were the younger, more idealistic ones, those who had not yet been corrupted by the education system. It might have been interesting if Sandy Dennis had done a sequel to Up The Down Staircase 20 years later and some writer could have speculated as to how her character changed.Some of the types she ran into are those that I saw back in the day, folks like principal Sorrell Booke, Boys Dean Roy Poole, school secretary Jean Stapleton, and teachers like Ruth White, Patrick Bedford, and Eileen Heckart.One of my favorites is poor Janice Mars, the uptight school librarian who feels that her work is under-appreciated. Our librarians back in the day reminded me of her. Frustration mounts on both sides of the front desk. Would be novelist Patrick Bedford dismisses a note written by love starved teen Ellen O'Mara, just correcting her grammar and punctuation. As a result O'Mara jumps out his classroom window. My favorite scene is with Dennis and the parent/teacher conferences and seeing some of the parents you now understand why the kids are the ragged lot they are.Dennis does a fine job as the eager and bright newcomer. As for school pictures like Up The Down Staircase, only the teen fashions change.

Bel Kaufman's book concerning the frazzled first term for an idealistic young schoolteacher in a tough, underfunded New York high school becomes literate, if unexciting dramatic film. Sandy Dennis (indeed frazzled, but with a firm jaw) slowly gains control of her homeroom, which is full of the usual rabble rousers and teenage clichés: the apple-polisher, the quiet kid awaiting a breakthrough, the lonely poetry-lover, the tough kid in his leather jacket, the racial hothead, the class clown, et al. Those in the administration and faculty are predictable cut-outs as well, and the actors (though well-cast) cannot overcome their overly-pointed vignettes with such facile dialogue (as with the librarian complaining about an overdue book checked out by a student who attempted suicide). Once our heroine announces her intended resignation, all we have left to wait for is one student to tell her she's made a difference. It's terribly well-meaning, but not very cognizant of honest human behavior. We can chart Dennis' progress and growth as a teacher, but we never get to know her personally (and this seems deliberate). One can easily read a book while the film is on and still catch all the programmed nuances it carefully slips in. **1/2 from ****

The writer of the source material for this film, the novel UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE, Bel Kaufman, was Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem's granddaughter. She was also the film's "technical adviser". She was my home room and English teacher at Taft High School in The Bronx circa 1960. Decades later when she was interviewed she admitted that she deliberately ignored the boys in her classes so she could concentrate on teaching the girls. Only the girls.Ms. Technical Adviser permitted the dreadful lie that she taught in some "inner city hell" of a school. Taft at the time was located one block from the Grand Concourse that hadn't even begun the long slide to become the notorious South Bronx. Neither phrase, "inner city" nor "South Bronx" had yet been invented. In fact in the mid sixties a huge Jewish center (now the Bronx Museum of the Arts) and the Executive Towers co-op, the tall white building seen in the background of shots taken from behind home plate at Yankee Stadium, were built. It was a comfortable, middle class Jewish neighborhood. The idea that there were all these tough, armed kids roaming the halls was pure crap. The real tough kids were shipped out to other schools such as the all-boys DeWitt Clinton or a technical High School like Evander Childs. The really tough High Schools in The Bronx were located in the east Bronx or below 149th St.Anyway, in the world of Hollywood films the dedicated teacher must be fighting their way up hill against dead head thug students from underprivileged background who, well some of them, become enlightened. We can celebrate her successes but recognize that, sadly, she can't reach everyone. What crap. That's every teacher movie (except the sensitive bullied boy/girl in boarding school movie). The story revolves around a male teacher whom a shy, overweight girl student is infatuated with. He returns her plaintive love note to her corrected for grammar and spelling. The girl commits suicide by jumping off the roof. The male teacher is the designated villain. According to today's ethics he behaves faultlessly. If the novel and film were to be rewritten today the girl would be killing herself because she was sexually assaulted by the male teacher. Of course he is nothing but the designated villain. Whatever terrible thing would send an impressionable girl spinning to her doom is to be ascribed to the "evil" man. Whatever it would take to move the script the man is the designated villain. So very much like the man-hating castrating author of the piece. So many of the teachers in this era in The Bronx must have been like this but never so celebrated so that their confessions years later were not recorded as was Kaufman's. This generation of women, because of prejudice, went to Hunter and not Harvard, became schoolteachers and not something more glamorous or remunerative. Only a few, I imagine, were as unethical as Bel Kaufman, to take it out on their male students and make a male teacher the ethically challenged villain of their novel.The phoniness of the novel was multiplied again by the dishonesty of the film script set in some cliché "inner city" Hell Hole High, as if a teacher's profession were ignoble unless inspiring "at risk youth" from "underprivileged" backgrounds. The book and the movie are both crap, an advertisement and not literature, propaganda and not a film. A lie from beginning to end.