I saw
To Sir, With Love the year it came out in 1967.
I was almost 10 and it had a profound effect on me. In fact it altered the
course of my life. After I walked out of the movie I remember telling my
brother “I’m going to be a teacher.” I did. I taught for about 10 years in
public high school, and from the day I saw the film until the day I went into
the music business, my entire mindset was that of “Sir.” I wanted to make a
difference, and it was the influence of a film that caused this desire within
me. How many movies can one say that about?
It is almost impossible to discuss To Sir, With Love without
talking about the illusion and the reality of the 1960’s. The illusion was the
myth of youth, the power of idealism, and the belief that the future was wide
open. The reality of the 1960’s was that the decade essentially served as the
adolescence of the American 20th century. If adolescence is the
period where a young person finds their sense of morality and builds the
foundation of the person they will become, often through a series of innocent
idealistic and possibly foolish experiences, then that fateful decade was this
country’s teenage years. Benjamin Button-like, we were adults in the 1940’s and
then after World War II the soldiers came home, had historic numbers of babies
and those babies collectively threw our country into a prolonged period of
childish and exhilarating social experimentation that we are still reeling
from.
Like no other movie,
To Sir, With Love captures the
giddy idealism and the cultural feel of the times while proving itself to be
painfully difficult to rectify with the way things actually turned out. Sidney
Poitier, impossibly handsome, impossibly cultured, everything a young liberal audience
wants to believe in, is young teacher Mark Thackery, just given the unenviable
job of teaching a bunch of low-class high school seniors in a tough North
London neighborhood. In one minute of this black man being in front of a white
classroom all issues of class, race, youth and revolt are on the table. Poitier
simultaneously represents the new idealism and the old guard. The kids see him
as a square adult, the other teachers see him as a young upstart, and he finds
himself at the crossroads of his own belief system and his need to make a
living. Throughout the movie we are made aware that Mr. Thackery is also
seeking a career in engineering, and that the lure of the paycheck may overtake
his sense of societal obligation. The main thrust of the movie however, is the
struggle Poitier faces with the students. This was an era when bad kids wore
their hair long and played juvenile pranks. It is an eye-opening comparison to
Sandy Hook or Columbine. Our schools are a much more lethal place than they
used to be.
The real pleasure in To Sir, With Love comes from the
nostalgia it evokes. This nostalgia is not the depiction of an era for the sake
of fooling the audience, it is the actual item we are seeing. The young actors
depicting the schoolkids, particularly Judy Geeson and Lulu, are actually young
people in the 1960’s, looking and acting the way young people did. The dress,
styles and depiction of a mid-60’s London are spot-on. The movie also contains
what has to be one of the first rock videos as the title song (sung by Lulu) is
set to a montage of still images of the kids on a field trip to the Victoria
and Albert Museum. All this cultural window dressing frames the action of the
story nicely as Poitier slowly wins the students over by treating them as adults
instead of children and his character slowly comes to the realization that his
path lies in service to others. It is beautifully calculated to make the
impressionable young mind swoon with the possibilities of doing the right thing
with his/her life. It certainly had that effect on me.
Ultimately, this is what the 1960’s were about for so many
people. It was the naïve, mistaken impression that changing the world was a
simple a matter as wanting to do so. It ignored all the bothersome adult
realities that come with a more mature understanding of the ways of the world.
I hate to recognize this fact and ultimately hate that I’ve had to toe the
line, but a two-hour trip to a more idealistic me is always available in
To
Sir, With Love. It takes me to a place when art had the ability to
make me strive to do more with my life. At the end of the film, as the kids
acknowledge Mr. Thackery and Mr. Thackery comes to peace with his future, it is
impossible to not be struck by an uncomfortable twinge. One chuckles at
Thackery’s optimism for a better future, then one looks in the mirror and feels
ashamed.
- Paul Epstein
In the fall of 1992, the
writers of WarGames, the director of Field of Dreams, and an
incredible ensemble cast created an irresistible combination of suspense,
adventure, and comedy. Sneakers tells the story of Martin Bishop, who,
as a student in the late ‘60s, dabbled in proto-hacking and political prankery
just enough to attract the attention of the police, which triggered him to go
underground to avoid capture. To make a living Bishop assembles an unlikely
team of highly skilled individuals with similar histories with law enforcement
to help him test security systems of Bay Area businesses and organizations.
Bishop and his team start working for a mysterious new client who throws them
into the middle of a conspiracy to possess a technology that threatens to
destroy the ability to keep any information secret.
With Sneakers,
the filmmakers create a world in which Bishop and his team have believable
pasts while a streak of playful energy balances the deadly consequences at
stake. Sure, this movie is susceptible to the kind of inconsistencies common to
many Hollywood films, but Sneakers feels far more grounded than most
espionage adventure films of the last twenty-five years. Also, it’s hard not to
love a film that contains both a game of Scrabble that is pivotal to the plot
and a brief, joyful dance sequence that develops the characters!
