The New Pictures

Blackboard Jungle (M-G-M). "Don't be a hero," says the old teacher (Louis Calhern) to the new teacher (Glenn Ford), "and never turn your back to the class." Ford, an idealistic young man who hopes, as a teacher, to "shape minds, sculpt lives," looks puzzled. He knows that North Manual High School is "the garbage can of the educational system" of the big U.S. city he lives in, but is the situation really as bad as all that? He finds out that it is.

In his black hole of a school room, jampacked with 35 surly inmates, Teacher Ford spends all his energies in the fight to keep the barest sort of order. He humors, scolds, tries to entice interest. No luck. When he dares to discipline, one young hoodlum asks: "You ever try to fight 35 guys at one time, Teach?"

One night as Ford leaves school he hears screams from the library, gets there just in time to prevent the rape of a woman teacher by one of the older students. Next day his class gives him the silent treatment. That night, dead beat, he drops in for a drink at a bar near the school, stays for one too many. On the way home he is ambushed in an alley by a gang of boys and badly beaten up.

On the screen as in the novel by Evan Hunter, Blackboard Jungle suffers seriously from the vices of professional indignation, special pleading and general rostrumism. Sometimes it seems to raise false eyebrows and to grit false teeth. The resolution of the plot is so facile as to appear insincere. But the picture also has the virtues of its vices: social conscience, honest anger and a narrow but vital kindliness.

Cinematically, Blackboard Jungle is no great shakes. The camera work is commonplace and the emotional pace limps. The actors do better. Glenn Ford is a believable symbol of two-fisted do-goodism; Louis Calhern captures that special look of secret decay that can come from breathing chalk dust for 30 years. Better still are the students themselves, some of whom were borrowed from their desks in the Los Angeles public school system. The sense of them there in the background has obviously provided a true emotional standard to which the professional actors, notably Sidney Poitier and Vic Morrow, could repair.

More important, however, than the letter of the film is the spirit. It seizes a burning issue, and lets the sparks fall where they may.

East of Eden (Warner) provides, for those who can stand it, an experience as complex and fascinating as that of playing three-dimensional chess with three different opponents. The three levels in this film are occupied by the Bible story of Cain and Abel, by John Steinbeck's recent novel (TIME, Sept. 22, 1952), which attempts to retell the eternal tale as a modern instance, and by Director Elia Kazan's effort to reconcile the spirit of both with his own sharp sense of the story's meaning and with the claims of commerce.

Commerce should be well satisfied. The picture is brilliant entertainment, and more than that it announces a new star, James Dean, whose prospects look as bright as any young actor's since Marlon Brando. Kazan has less reason to be pleased. Steinbeck reduced the story of Cain and Abel to a sort of rutting party in a California lettuce patch. Kazan although he cleans out a good deal of the false dirt under Steinbeck's fingernails has diminished the story still further and stuffed it into a tight little psychoanalytic pigeonhole: father problem.

The story, as Kazan tells it covers less than half of Steinbeck's book. Caleb (James Dean) and Aron (Richard Davalos) are the sons of Adam Trask (Raymond Massey), a California farmer who just before the start of World War I develops a method of shipping-vegetable's on ice Aron the "good" boy, takes after his father. Caleb, the "bad" one, takes after his mother (Jo Van Fleet). Adam tells his sons that their mother is dead, but one day when the bad boy is about 16 he finds her living in the next town, the madam of a bawdyhouse.

When Father Adam goes broke in the ice business, Caleb secretly borrows $5,000 from his mother, turns a big profit in the war boom and tries to give back to his father the money he lost. In self-righteous anger the old man refuses Caleb's "blood money," not truly caring that it did not come from Caleb's pocket but from his heart. And Caleb's brother Aron orders him to stay away from Abra (Julie Harris), the girl they both love, because he is not fit for her.

In a fury of grief and vengeance, Caleb tells his brother the truth about their mother. The shock drives Aron almost out of his mind. When the father sees what has happened to his favorite son, he suffers a stroke. Caleb, repentant but despairing of forgiveness, prepares to leave his father even as Cain "went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden"; but Abra persuades rather and son to a reconciliation.

Much of this is genuinely high drama, and some of it is high cinema too. The four major players play together like a fine string quartet, not as though they were creating the beauty but as though it were passing through them. Julie Harris is the viola, a wonderfully tactful performer, the subtlest of them all. Raymond Massey is the cello: the interpretation is right, though he thumps a little. And Richard Davalos as Aron plays a strong second to the soloist, James Dean, a young man from Indiana who is unquestionably the biggest news Hollywood has made in 1955.

Dean, like Julie Harris, Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint and most of the young people Kazan uses, is a product of The Actor's Studio, sometimes known as "the tilted-pelvis school" of naturalistic acting. Like many Studio students, who have been brought up on "the Stanislavsky Method," Dean tries so hard to find the part in himself that he often forgets to put himself into the part. But no matter what he is doing, he has the presence of a young lion and the same sense of danger about him. His eye is as empty as an animal's, and he lolls and gallops with the innocence and grace of an animal. Then, occasionally, he flicks a sly little look that seems to say, "Well, all this is human too--or had you forgotten?"

In East of Eden Kazan demonstrates again that he is a director of wide abilities. He has passion, taste, a rare sense of the whole, a warm care for little things. He is a man, above all, who knows exactly what he wants and exactly how to get it. He leaves very little room for bad luck--or for good luck either. In his direction there are few interventions of divine inspiration; Kazan has enough inspirations of his own. Something valuable is gained: intelligence and control. Something invaluable is lost: innocence and mystery.

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