To Sir With Love: The Cool Gentleman Teacher Classic (1967)

To Sir With Love: The Cool Gentleman Teacher Classic (1967), Some say in social justice as well as pop culture, that the tumultuous 60s was like a final exam term paper test compared to the have-a-nice-day 70s. Others say that it was the non conformist decade where the counterculture made its best mark on the establishment.

In cinema it was a period of existential experimentation and free spirit disengagement. However, in the midst of it all there were charming films out of the UK that depicted youth struggles and mixed them with pop hits of the day to sound off on relevant urban themes.

None was as poignant, well cast and scored as To Sir With Love, an across the pond London town version of Blackboard Jungle where an an out of work engineer from Brit Guiana (Sidney Poitier) settles for a lowbrow teaching gig at a rough east end school. Weary of the bad rep, he has his reticent school shift cut out for him to instruct a class of juvenile rejects. And ringleader delinquents (Christian Roberts and Judy Geeson), head the unruly students who give him a hard time until he has a wise psychological plan to tame their furor.

After the youth mob starts a toiletry fire, a spark is lit under him on how to calm the uproar and deal with their acting out. As a ploy to get them to make their teen angst an integral part of the class curriculum, he lets them speak their mind as adults to better control the interaction. A run in with a student and gym teacher as well as a charity case who loses his mom sidetracks him in his search for an engineer employment alternative. But a museum outing, boxing match and climactic class dance serve as the community signs that he shall win them over.

Since no 60s high school picture could do without a fresh teen anthem, pop star Lulu in a bit role reprises her film title theme tune in the conclusion wherein teach is presented with a gift and a measure of belonging with a return jibe engagement for next year. This film, while dismissed as pap by some for its soft edges, works because you can't help but get the gut feeling that Sidney is playing an upstanding character closest to himself. The only other Brit flick to give this a run for its scope was Georgie Girl with Lynn Redgrave a year earlier.

Up until the time this became a box office hit, Poitier was an iconic Hollywood player whose body of work usually relied on race as a part of the plot or purpose of his casting. That was not so with this film, the lead portrayal of which could have been filled by any everyman to represent temperance in the face of school days aversion. He fit the role nicely due to his feckless image as a gentrified gent, not for cultural association. A dutiful ode to his sincere cinema persona, it remains his most sentimentally memorable movie performance.

In teen box office eras afterwards, most high school subject matter archetypes would not be as limited to disadvantaged incorrigibles and would run the gamut of the social pecking order so as to lessen teacher/student confrontations as overdone plot devises. Ever since, there have been takes on the genre with more humor and less pathos, but few so plausible and playful as this 60s gem. To witness Mr. Poitier at the height of his star powers babysitting school conflict with grace under pressure, order this education recess on disk or a stream.

To Sir With Love: The Cool Gentleman Teacher Classic (1967) 2013-06-01T04:36:00-07:00 Rating: 4.5 Diposkan Oleh: My Videos Tube