To Sir, with Love 1967
Within the last couple of years I watched two of Sidney Poitier’s biggest movies, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and was very impressed with his presence, but also impressed that those two movies plus this one, all came out the same year, 1967. He received his Oscar before all of that, in 1963, for Lilies of the Field, which I still need to watch. I was surprised to see that James Clavell, who wrote so many novels turned into movies, directed this movie, based on E. R. Braithwaite’s book. Clavell made a ton of money on the film, taking a small up-front salary for 30% of the gross of $42 million. Poitier also made a ton with a similar deal, but for 10%.
Poitier plays an out of work engineer who takes a job teaching high school students in a bad neighborhood in London. I was hoping for a solid drama, but instead this movie is pretty light, barely touching on a few real issues of life in a tough neighborhood. It is almost Welcome Back, Kotter without the jokes. After butting heads with ill behaved students, Poitier quickly gives up teaching the material (seemingly a hodgepodge of literature and weights and measures) and just teaches them whatever they want to learn and whatever he wants to teach in order to give them real life skills since they are about to graduate. One day he teaches them to make a salad. Seriously. One day he takes them to a museum, but they must not have allowed filming in the museum, because that is a montage of still shots (to the song “To Sir, with Love,” which is good, but used several times). He is able to quickly gain the respect of most of the students by insisting they behave like adults. There are some elements of truth and some decent messages that people must have appreciated in 1967, but this is a complete fantasy. It is like a Disney version of what I was hoping for. A surprising number of minutes of the movie are the students dancing, which they like to do on their break, to a record player of generic 60’s music. In the end, Poitier becomes a respected member of the community and his fellow teachers praise him for being so good at his job (of not teaching the material?). Some things have not aged well, like when he loses his temper early on and calls the girls in his class “sluts,” kind of out of the blue. Maybe some of the grittier aspects of high school life had to be left out by codes of the time. Some of the conflicts could have been dealt with a little better, but the movie’s heart is in the right place. Poitier’s other movies of 1967 far exceed this one, but he is still interesting to watch.
Written: 17 Mar 2022