7 - Blackboard Jungle (1955): A Cinematic Education

Summary

Although the film authorship of Richard Brooks has received little attention in cinema studies, his 1955 film Blackboard Jungle has certainly not been ignored. While Brooks himself is not at the center of very much of this discourse, scholars have nevertheless dissected the film from a range of perspectives. This work includes examinations of the film's depiction of an interracial, urban vocational school in the mid-twentieth century, and its representation of American high-school pedagogy during this period more generally. The film's subversive incorporation of rock ‘n’ roll music has also attracted scholarly interest (see Reinsch).

Few writers, however, offer substantive consideration of the film as an adaptation of Evan Hunter's 1954 novel The Blackboard Jungle. Douglass K. Daniel, in his study of Brooks, does offer a helpful itemization of some salient differences between novel and film:

First, [Brooks] took an anecdote told by one teacher about another—the teacher had once turned his back on his class and a student threw a baseball, taking a chunk out of the blackboard—and put Dadier in place of the teacher under fire. In the book, Dadier's wife, Anne, suffers the stillbirth of their son. However, [the script of the film] allows the baby to be born alive if prematurely, perhaps trying to keep the overall tone upbeat. [Brooks] also makes student Artie West more menacing in the film, showing West leading the afterschool assault on Dadier and the other teacher.

This chapter will go beyond charting differences between the two works, looking closely at a handful of selected passages from the book and moments from the film to underscore some of Brooks's significant choices as a director.

Brooks was of course informed by Hunter's novel, but he also had his own set of filmmaking problems to solve, relatively independently of the antecedent text. Brooks's choices as a director have effects of their own, ones that do not simply illustrate a pre-existing text but engage in a complex dialogue with it. What follows rests on the idea that Brooks's creative act of translating The Blackboard Jungle to the screen intersects in various ways with the subject matter of his film.