Better In Your Head?--UP THE DOWN STAIRCASE

 

Spoiler Alert: shit ain't changed. 

THE BOOK-Written by Bel Kaufman, released 1964

THE MOVIE-Directed by Robert Mulligan, written by Tad Mosel, released 1967

THE STORY-Calvin Coolidge High is a typical run-down inner-city school. Sylvia Barrett is a typical idealistic inner-city high school English teacher. Amid a maelstrom of indifference and incompetence, she strives to maintain her dignity.

MIND THE GAP-Bel Kaufman logged twenty years in the New York public school system before the publication of her first novel. Up the Down Staircase became a huge bestseller, adults and adolescents alike fascinated by the chaotic menagerie of defiance, diffidence, cynicism, and--somewhere between the first and final paragraphs--hope.

"Get lost & stay there." After reading UTDS for the first time in middle school, this line left my mouth at least once a day every day for a week. (Or, until my father overheard me saying it to my mother.)

The novel's unconventional format did not impede its success. The first and last chapters are exclusively dialogue; the dozens in between are comprised of office memos, note fragments, lesson plans, essays, letters and, most winningly, student contributions to Ms. Barrett's suggestion box. The book meanders occasionally, and no character besides Sylvia Barrett is afforded the honor of a second dimension, but for the most part, UTDS is a zippy time-capsule read.

And a pioneer of the "idealistic teacher touches hardened young hearts" sub-genre. All the hits are present: brilliant delinquent, bitter black kid, resentful chubby girl, slouching loner hidden dynamo, ditzy romantic and of course, misogynist mook one bad decision away from prison. Kaufman gives the reader just enough of these youths to entice interest, but it's the newest overworked grinder entrusted with the furtherance of their education who looms largest. (As would soon be tradition.)

Sandy Dennis (looking like Hayley Mills in a Kathleen Turner biopic) is super-likeable at best, bemusing at worst as the overwhelmed teacher. Most of the onscreen faculty are pleasant, bar Mr. Barringer, whom Patrick Redford managed to make exponentially more odious, a hyper-affected and hypo-hearted jerk whose kind has sadly never stopped reaping life's great rewards. Re: the students, I wanted to beat every one of them up, so, well done.

Mrs. Bannister...Mr. Gisriel...thank you.

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-Up the Down Staircase is an important novel. It is not a great novel.

The odd format and limited point-of-view means the school year's most interesting moments (events another writer might fatten and flatter) are reduced to bullet points in pro/con columns. The film, by necessity, must flesh out these moments, must make us believe Mrs. Barrett has made a real difference in the life of at least one of these goof-offs. 

It does. No facile exploitation of the problems facing our nation's youth, this. Credit a sensitive director, a lucid script, an age-appropriate cast, and New York City itself. The bustle of an average school day--a daily stab at gradual betterment in the midst of stifling bureaucracy--gains a desperation absent from Kaufman's text. The film didn't make me laugh as much, but it made me feel a lot more. And that's meaningful.