To Ma'am with Love

Back in September, TCM ran a spotlight on teachers in the movies. One of the movies that I hadn't blogged about before is Up the Down Staircase. The movie being available on DVD, I recorded it and recently sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

Sandy Dennis plays Sylvia Barrett, who has recently gotten her graduate degree in education and is about to start her first job as a real teacher, as Calvin Coolidge High School, in a poor, multi-ethnic part of New York City. (Two different high schools in Manhattan were used for filming.) Miss Barrett arrives for her first day to find a chaotic school that faces all sorts of challenges and, frankly, some amount of mismanagement, considering that she's asked how many basketballs she as an English teacher needs.

When Miss Barrett arrives to her room, she finds that she's going to be teaching a wide variety of student character types. One of the more minor characters is the smarmy guy who tries to please the teachers and who has gotten himself elected president of the student council as a result; another is the young man who the guidance counselor Miss Friedneberg (Florence Stanley) claims has latent homosexual tendencies, the late 1960s being a time when you just didn't talk about those things (and of course there's the question of whether it's even accurate).

The bigger problems are Alice (Ellen O'Mara), who has a crush on another English teacher, Mr. Barringer (Patrick Bedford); Barringer would frankly rather be writing a novel instead of teaching. There's also Jose, the kid who's gotten in trouble with the law; Eddie, the black kid who really wants to be a mechanic but needs to graduate even if he doesn't really need English class to be that mechanic; and Joe, the chronic underachiever who for whatever reason doesn't seem to want to apply himself to academic work.

Miss Barrett tries to reach all of her students, with varying degrees of success. This being the 1960s and a school with a multi-ethnic student body, there's some discussion of race, although it's surprisingly more focused on Barrett's not understanding things -- notably Eddie's foster mother -- than on students of various races not getting along. They seem to have much better race relations than I would have thought happened in real life.

Eventually, after just one term, Miss Barrett has decided she's had enough of this school, and tells her principal, Dr. Bester (Sorrell Booke who, hailing from Buffalo NY is nothing like Boss Hogg), that she plans to resign. The school district is so screwed up that they keep sending her retirement forms, not resignation forms, but this delay leads to the eventual resolution that you can probably guess.

Up the Down Staircase made me think a lot of To Sir, With Love, which came out a year earlier. This one is based on a novel by Bel Kaufman, who herself was a real-life teacher and presumably based her book on some of her real-life experiences. The movie breaks no new ground, but it's anchored by a strong performance from Sandy Dennis, good performances from the rest of the cast, and that excellent location shooting inside a real high school.

If you haven't seen Up the Down Staircase before, it's definitely worth a watch.