The Blackboard Jungle by Evan Hunter

This is the first big selling novel produced by Evan Hunter. It came out in 1955 and reflects his own work as a teacher in such a school for a very brief time. 

It is a well done, plot and character heavy novel, that has some grounding in social concerns. Namely, Are these schools working at all? 

The novel has a lot of common association with the youth culture. The screenplay also by Hunter was directed by Richard Brooks in a movie that came out in 1955. Unfortunately the content of it all was overshadowed by pop music. Legend has it that Rock Around the Clock recorded by Bill Haley and his band was the first rock song used it a movie. The song became a big hit and it is said to have begun the rock and roll change over to this newer type of music being heavily marketed to young white kids. Mass communication and corporate power took care of the rest of it, niche marketing and a few other things less important produced the generation gap. It is interesting that a book that is so thoughtful ended up marketing the generation gap and made the juvenile delinquent appear cool and edgy. 

Of course this doesn’t happen front reading the book. The JD’s in the book are confused kids trying to live through a time in an institution that doesn’t work and practically forces them to act like jerks to get along with the other kids. But they sure look cool and act cool in the movie. Movies have trouble getting deeper than surface cool. The movies become a battle of the Cools, whoever's image comes off the better, is the most memorable, wins the movie. The Joker will outlast Batman. He is just Don’t-Give-a-shit-COOLER.

The notion of Rock Around The Clock, a really basic dumb lyric diddy, overshadowing impact of the novel’s story is discouraging. 

(I don’t recall if I ever saw the movie all the way through.I know it’s a good movie, a riveting melodrama.)

The plot of the book is basically a new young male teacher gets his first job out of college in a tough all boys vocational high school in The Bronx, NYC. It’s the old hero’s journey with him coming in all idealistic but having that questioned with the disillusioning reality of it. It is far far from easy and physically dangerous. 

He also has a, pregnant with their first, wife at home in their housing project apartment.
 

There is a very interesting scene in the book about youth culture that has its base in the marketing of music. Another new male teacher, Josh, befriends our Rick. Josh is a big pop music fan with a big record collection. He and Rick go out for a drink and Josh tells him excitedly about his plan to connect with the students by bringing in his cherished record collection. 

The class where he brings the records is vividly set out in the novel. He very reverently presents the big band stars from 10 years before. This is met with disrespect and ridicule. The novel is written before the conversion to vinyl LPs.The shellac records back then were stiff brittle and breakable fragile.  

It is in no way explicitly stated as to the meaning and point of this episode, but I have a high level of interest in the effects of art, culture, and mostly popular culture on our lives. I’m on the lookout for stuff like that and the record gap scene appealed to me from that perspective. 

The point of conflict with the teacher and the students is the students’ long standing alienation from a system that they can feel is not at all in their best interests. So any individual teacher vanishes behind the role of being another agent for the enemy system. The same thing works in reverse with the jaded tuned-out teachers seeing the students as all being “garbage” in a dumping ground school. This is all clearly pointed out in the novel.

In the record scene a new teacher still has hope of connecting with the students with something that he takes as indisputably wonderful, something he holds dear and loves. Something connected to when he was like them, only 10 years ago, young, and open. Here another problem beyond to one of the school system surfaces. Culture went from locally based to centralize and attached to the capitalist need for growth, the cultural is artificially split up in service to market profits. Telling a specific demographic, “You are special!, They are old, here is your special music, that crap is old and wasn’t as good as they thought it was to begin with because they were less sophisticated back then”. None of these people have control or even cognizance of this hijacking of whatever human culture once was, not that is was much better in whatever, “Back then”, but surely somewhat different before mass electronic media controlled by remote corporations dominated our common entertainment choices. They/we just go along as conditioned.
This is all illustrated in the record scene. Reading it today the absurdity is amplified by our view of the pop music of 60 and 70 years ago. It’s all old, old fashioned stuff on some level even if it’s “great”. The kids in the scene ridicule the big bands, Glenn Miller, etc while asking for Julius LaRosa. LaRosa was no radical performer, just the latest product in a long line. 

Also perhaps concerning shifting points of view the young female teacher is badly handled. It could have worked a little better if this could have been two characters. She is sexually assaulted, attacked by student in the hall top ripped open, breast exposed, rescued by our hero Rick. But couldn’t some teacher other than her come on to him in an unsubtle way later in the novel? We get how he has to deal with workplace sexual harassment, that is fine and interesting, but it should have been a different character than the one he rescues from being raped.. 

Aside from that this is the type of novel that anyone going into or involved with teaching at an institution, might want to read. It is very sad that sixty years later the same problems continue in the same type of institutions, more or less. It this kind of 19th century home/work/school idea ever going to work out again, if it ever did?

It very enjoyable and rich read in multiple ways.  There is a lot of plot and story that moves things along and issues to think about. Nicely done.

Happy New Year, Herbie & other stories by Evan Hunter

Uncle Jimbo’s Marbles, takes place in a summer camp for kids. The focus is on a 19 year NYC man who has a job as a camp counselor. There is a lockdown at the camp. They can’t leave and become deeply involved with playing marbles. The story is a commentary on humanity’s obsession on unimportant things like the accumulation of symbolic  wealth. It’s a comic story. Good. 

——-

The Tourists, is set in Jamaica with a NYC middle class couple on vacation. They encounter a shopkeeper. They are tourists and acquire knowledge as to who they are. Interesting story. 

——-

On the Sidewalk, Bleeding, is set in an alley in NYC. 

A stabbed young gang member contemplates his life as his life runs down the gutter. The story about getting caught as a symbol of something stupid and frivolous when other things are more important. 

——-

The Fallen Angel is a story set in a low budget circus. It is in the voice of the circus owner. The content is supernatural which is not the type of thing Hunter usually came up with. It’s kind of getting into Bradbury turf. Not the best of the lot. 

——-

Alive Again

This one is set in midtown NYC. 

Former lovers meet on the street and go for a drink. 

He wants to start back up again with their affair. She was married and still is. 

Good little story. Deeper than the circus thing above. 

——-

The Prisoner 

Here we have a cop story. Probably not one that would satisfy the McBain fans, but I don’t know. I never read Ed. 

In this a hard boiled, and corrupted, NYC detective gets a bit of a lesson from a young woman he brings in on a prostitution charge. 

Patriarchal and cop entitlement content. 

Pretty good story. 

——-

S.P.Q.R

This one feels to be from actual experience or an appearance of that because it involves two writers hired by a Hollywood producer to write a script based of Julius Caesar. This in in first person again, the voice of one of the writers whose only book was a novel Slum Boy (= Blackboard Jungle?) 

It’s an amusing story that pokes fun at Hollywood and it’s ideas of what would be popular while commenting on the hired hack side of the writing business. 

——-

The Final Yes

This story of to-be-or-not with PTSD content is so far the most powerful of the collection. 

It is sort of the inverse of Melville’s “I prefer not to” in. Bartelby. The man in this story says yes and loses, or so he thinks, and this has become a sort of obsession that is destroying him. 

This one gave me goosebumps. 

Great. 

——-

The Innocent One 

With a setting amongst Hispanic bean field workers, this one is a bit more of a stretch into the unknown by the author. Not that he doesn’t have any working class experience

At any rate, the setting is for a quick story about suspicion and misunderstandings as one worker mentions the other’s wife in casual conversation setting off an afternoon of jealousy with no basis whatsoever in any evidence or accusations. 

——-

Pretty Eyes

Many of the Hunter stories and books I have read are about NYC people on vacation. 

This is one of those. A woman who is single is on vacation in Florida. 

She doesn’t think she is attractive and doesn’t believe the men who come on to her by telling her how attractive she is. This is a rather sad story about miscommunication after a series of lies. 

How can we know if someone is being truthful if we think they want something from us?

I liked this one

——-

Million Dollar Maybe 

This is an early comic story that has to do with a trip to the moon. Early, meaning copywriter 1953, like 16 years before people got to the moon. 

A magazine publisher finds he is trapped by a promotion a previous owner had published in 1926. 

Interesting story as preposterous as it is. 

——-

Happy New Year, Herbie. 

This is a story about class, regional differences and bullying. It is set on an island in the East River in NYC. Hunter spends an unusual amount of time with the details of this setting. After WWII students are housed on an island called South Brother. The young narrator and his wife are living there with other students. They have a young child although only 19 and 21. The woman is distressed that she is a mother younger than she really wanted to be derailing plans for a bohemian artist/study life in Paris after school. 

But the story, the longest in the book, shifts to a new couple who arrive. They are not like the others, older, he is 38 she 36 and from the Midwest with accents that are said to be grating to these NYCers. 

The tone shifts to the narrator seeing that a local young mover and shaker is bullying Herbie the new man who is learning to be a TV repairman. He is also open and kindly, but different which leaves him vulnerable to the bullying. The narrator sees the injustice and attempts to set it right 

Anti-bullying in a theme in the writings of Evan Hunter. It is what both Last Summer and Come Winter. The major theme of those novels.

Interesting and elaborate story that ultimately left me with a warm feeling. 

Side note on the material about the 19 year old mother in the story who would rather have waited. My mother was 19 was I was born. I don’t think that was a good thing for her, my father or me.

Those Lips, Those Eyes, Billie Joe, and Glynnis O'Connor

Those Lips, Those Eyes (1980)

This film is set in a regional theater somewhere in 1951.

It was written by David Shaber and directed by Michael Pressman. 

It is a kind of a routine boy becomes a man out in the world story. Tom Hulce plays a working class kid who has medical school hopes but becomes enamored with the local theater where he gets a job as a prop man. Excellent working class pop character created by Jerry Stiller.

Frank Langella plays the star of the show. He is a New York actor frustrated in being stuck on the road in the type of plays that sell on the road. But he tries to keep positive and is most of the time but certainly not always. Langella is very good in this and beings something to this familiar character type. 

Langella’s character takes the kid under his wing and conspires in helping him hookup with an dancer/actress in the company and this is where the movie took off for me. 

The love object is played by Glynnis O'Connor and the character written for her is quite interesting in that she keeps making moves on the boy, is eager in fact, but he keeps messing things up by romanticizing the whole thing way out of proportion to what the more sophisticated, from NYC, young woman has in mind. At the most she is looking for a run-of-the-show lover while he fantasizes about moving to NYC to be with her. 

Glynnis O'Connor is great in this. I was not aware of her before. She does a fine job bringing to life a few nice scenes she is given. In particular when she confesses doubt, frustration, and puzzlement about the meaning of it all, the work to get to a thankless role. The type of “success” one settles for not shoots for. 

Glynnis O'Connor age 25 when this was shot is also very physically attractive and uses her body and face to create this character that I didn’t want to take my eyes off. 

Therefore:

Ode to Billie Joe (1976)

This movie happened to be on TCM the very next day. I like to check out what is coming up before hand and was excited to see that Glynnis O'Connor is in this too. Of course I had to watch it.

That turned out to be an excellent idea because it is a very interesting movie. I wasn’t expecting much. I mean, it was directed by Jethro Bodine. No, really! Max Baer Jr from The Beverly Hillbillies directed it. There is some logic to that I guess.
I can see a cigar chomping Hollywood executive,
“Hillbilly movie? Get Jethro!”
Well, fine but he also hired a real screenwriter, Herman Raucher, and apparently Bobble Gentry was actually involved in the process.
Spoiler Alert!

Anyway we find out what they threw of the damn bridge, FINALLY! I’ve been wondering for like 45 years. But this thing is far from done because the there is a big surprise of a bisexual element in the story. 

I thought this was really interesting and made is a rather good movie over all. 

Glynnis O'Connor is really the star of the movie. And here again she is very good. She was just 20 when this was shot. I much more innocent character. Around the same time 1950, but a country girl without electricity and indoor plumbing. This is a girl becoming a woman character, not like the woman in Those Lips.

So the question in my mind is why have I never heard of her before this? She has kept working, a lot of TV of the sort I never watch. Yet she is not one of the stars we all know. By the evidence of these two movies she should have been a Jennifer Jason Leigh, or Julia Roberts level star. 

But like the speech so so believably delivers in Those Lips, Those Eyes, you do a lot of great work and bust yourself to stay in the game and the payoff isn’t much

A lot of the time anyway. 

I’m not finished digging through the Glynnis O'Connor catalogue. She delivers what I want acting to be.