To Sir, With Love

To Sir, With Love poster

Relevance

Morrissey paid tribute to the film by posing for a photograph (by Juergen Teller) at the corner of Tench Street / Reardon Street - which Sidney Poitier walks down during the film.
It was used/licenced for use as a poster.
Morrissey mentions this film in Autobiography as one he'd watch with his sister:

"My sister and my mother never sing, but my sister and I were united in the glorification of the social problem film – a fly-by television treat never to be missed, especially the school-as-cesspit honesty of Spare The Rod (1961), Term Of Trial (1962), Up The Down Staircase (1967) or To Sir, With Love (1967), wherein slum kids are shown to endure in sufferance the pointlessness of secondary education (for what use is anything at all that is secondary?). Blackboard Jungle (1957) had been the first to free teachers – spouting resentment at the no-hope kids who were, by birth, three rungs below scum – and boundaries of frankness snapped. Jackie and I would watch as many films as we could, long before the days when television channels refused to transmit monochrome films for fear that no one would watch."

Mentioned In

• Sound And Vision - Movieline (1993)

Wikipedia Information

To Sir, with Love is a 1967 British drama film that deals with social and racial issues in an inner city school. It stars Sidney Poitier and features Christian Roberts, Judy Geeson, Suzy Kendall, Patricia Routledge and singer Lulu making her film debut. James Clavell directed from his own screenplay, which was based on E. R. Braithwaite's 1959 autobiographical novel of the same name. The film's title song "To Sir with Love", sung by Lulu, peaked at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the United States for five weeks in the autumn of 1967 and ultimately was the best-selling single in the United States that year; meanwhile, Sidney Poitier was the first black actor to win a Golden Globe Award. The movie ranked number 27 on Entertainment Weekly's list of the 50 Best High School Movies. The film premiered and became a hit one month before another film about troubled schools, Up the Down Staircase, appeared. A made-for-television sequel, To Sir, with Love II, was released in 1996, with Poitier reprising his starring role.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Sir,_with_Love

Related Forum Threads

• [Morrissey Central] "TO SIR, WITH LOVE" (January 7, 2022) - Morrissey-solo (Jan 07, 2022)