Conrack

Another movie coming up on TCM that seems to be out of print on DVD is Conrack, which is going to be on TCM tonight at 6:00 PM.

John Voight plays Pat Conroy, who gets up early one spring morning in 1969. Pat lives in Beaufort, SC, and takes the boat over to one of the barrier islands that are part of the same archipelago as the islands in the recently blogged about Daughters of the Dust. When he gets to the island, he asks where the school is, pointing out that he's the new teacher. If he's the teacher, he should be able to read the signs that point the way to the school.

Conroy gets to the school, and finds it's a one-room schoolhouse that frankly looks like it should have collapsed by now. The students are all black, dirt poor, and profoundly ignorant (in the neutral sense of the word simply meaning that they don't know). It's as though, in spite of there being electricity, modernity never came to the island. Where do you begin with people who probably can't read, and can barely count to ten? The black woman principal, Mrs. Scott (Madge Sinclair), refers to the children as her babies and that they need tough love.

Conroy loves to teach, however, and he's going to try to show these children a little something of the world, in much the same way that Sidney Poitier did as a teacher dropped into a completely different culture in To Sir With Love. To reach the children, none of whom bother to even get his name right (hence the title of the movie), Conroy has to resort to some unorthodox methods, such as taking the kids out of class to teach them to swim when he finds out the extent of the drowning problem on the island. And when the local moonshiner Billy (Paul Winfield) confesses that he wants to learn to read and write, Conroy teaches him in exchange for liquor.

Meanwhile, the superintendent of schools, Mr. Skeffington (Hume Cronyn) comes across from the mainland from time to time to check in on Conroy. He's old-fashioned, having been teaching for 40 years, and isn't so certain about Conroy's methods. That, and he has to deal with the other people in town, who have an even less accepting attitude towards black people, this being 1960s South Carolina. The students, however, grow to respect and even like their teacher.

Conrack is based on the true story of author Pat Conroy's own time teaching on one of the barrier islands, turned into the book The Water Is Wide (which I haven't read). I really liked it, although I have to admit that as I was watching it I found myself wondering how much the students really would have learned. Those students have no need of knowing yet about Humphrey Bogart or Sidney Poitier; they have much more basic needs as we see in the swimming scene. And yet the cultural enrichment scenes of listening to Beethoven struck me as similar to the scenes from To Sir With Love when Poitier takes the students to the museum.

All of the actors give good performances, with the students being authentic because they weren't actors. IMDb says that they were Conroy's real students from a few years earlier, and that a couple of them went on to become teachers themselves, so apparently Conroy's teaching had quite the effect on them. This is really Voight and the students' movie, with the other professional actors being very much supporting characters. And it's in those intimate scenes with Voight and the kids that the movie is at its best, be they in the one-room schoolhouse which lends itself to intimate shooting, or outside. The ending seemed a bit odd, although that may have happened in real life since Conroy comes across as nuts enough to do what he did in the movie.

It's a huge shame that Conrack isn't available on DVD because it's a very good movie that deserves to be much better known.