From Crayons to Perfume

In my classroom, poetry is its own reward
                 Louann Johnson, Dangerous Minds

The other night I stayed up well past my bedtime watching “Halls of Anger” (1970) on TCM, a movie that, while also about racism, belongs to the subgenre of movies about a teacher using unconventional methods to reach resistant students.  Others that come to mind are “To Sir With Love” (1967) and, “Dangerous Minds” (1995) but I know there are many others.  In each of these movies the students are inner-city and have been written off by “the system”.  The plot generally goes like this:  teacher tries to follow the required curriculum, students taunt teacher, teacher has angry outburst and throws out the textbook, students are won over, roll credits with uplifting song. 

I watched with #2 pencil and paper ready as I waited for the inevitable moment when a student would read poetry and the scales would fall from his eyes.  (I have a continuing obsession with poetry in movies.) As it turns out, in “Halls of Anger” actor Calvin Lockhart's teacher Quincy Davis further alienates his students when he tells them they’ll be studying the poetry of James Russell Lowell and Ralph Waldo Emerson,  among others.  One student says something like, “If I have to look at another poem by someone with three names I’m going to . . ."  Lockhart finally reaches his students by having them read aloud the sex scenes in a drug-store bodice ripper; once they’ve mastered those steamy passages (with much guffawing) he turns them on to Madame Bovary.  “That’s beautiful,” says Otis Day’s  Lerone Johnson upon finishing a description of Bovary’s response to love-making. [Correction - it was Lady Chatterly's Lover, D.H Lawrence, not Bovary  (see comments)-- sdh ]

Can you name any other such movies?  And I wonder, has there ever been such a movie where the teacher uses science or math to reach students? (Maybe this is the wrong place to ask that last question.)

-- sdh

Comments

[DL]

Dearest SDH, 250 miles away and we were, without knowing it, watching the same movie. (You probably assumed I had a ballgame on.) The poet with the three names in the episode you describe was William Cullen Bryant, as I recall, which surprised the heck out of me. There would have been more conventional choices. And that came after the scene in which he shows the kids that, though humiliated in a public test when they couldn't define words such as "utopia" (nice choice, since the meaning of the Latin word is "nowhere"), they have their own lingo, ghetto slang. And then the steamy sex scenes -- meant to titillate but also to convey to the angry young men something about the sexual desires of women. And didn't he also have them read D.H. Lawrence aloud? When the boy in awe says "that's beautiful!" it's one of literature's finest cinematic moments. Let's see it again -- this time together.

[Laura Orem]

Aww, you guys!

[Stacey]

David! You're right, it was Lady Chatterley's Lover not Madame Bovary and it was a great moment in the movie. I guess I was half asleep by then. Should I change the post? (RE: Lady C's Lover, I do remember finding it on the bookshelf of a family I babysat for when I was 12 or 13 and being quite interested in the passage with the phrase, "her pendulous breasts . . .")Another bit of info: the actor Otis Day is not the same person who later formed the band "Otis Day and the Nights" for the movie Animal House. Hah! Can't believe you watched it, too David.

[mitch s.]

i believe the greatest poetry scene is Natalie Wood reading Wordsworth in "Splendor in the Grass." More recently I think there is also poetry reading in "The History Boys," but I don't recall for sure. The granddaddy of the film genre you mention is "The Blackboard Jungle." About ten yrs ago there was a film about a calculus teacher in LA; I think it was called "Stand and Deliver," but again not certain. As a former hs teacher I love any scene in a classroom. Among European films, there's great stuff in "The 400 Blows," "Amarcord," and "Lonliness of the Long Distance Runner."

[DL]

Mitch, the scene with Natalie Wood breaking down in the midst of reciting the penultimate part of Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode" is, I believe, Stacey's favorite, though you would also enjoy the ingenious use director Don Siegel makes of Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" in the 1970s Charles Bronson espionage thriller, "Telefon."

[Stacey]

Mitch, David is right, the Splendor in the Grass scene is my favorite and the reason I started reading poetry as a girl. I posted it here.