Blackboard Jungle

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Blackboard Jungle film poster

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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."

Wikipedia Information

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Blackboard Jungle is a 1955 American social drama film about an English teacher in an interracial inner-city school, based on the 1954 novel The Blackboard Jungle by Evan Hunter and adapted for the screen and directed by Richard Brooks. It is remembered for its innovative use of rock and roll in its soundtrack, for casting grown adults as high school teens, and for the unique breakout role of a black cast member, Sidney Poitier, as a rebellious yet musically talented student. In 2016, Blackboard Jungle was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".