Uplifting Teach

While Robert Mulligan's sober, delightful, Up The Down Staircase (Warners-Seven Arts) went one week in Wellington, the similar eternal narcissistic Look at Lice, To Sewer ... , still continues to scrape even lower social strata to keep it in business.

Made before the other, it is gently unassuming and as competent as any other Mulligan films—whimsy as To Kill A Mockingbird, moving and unsentimental as Baby The Rain Must Fall, and as unsure-of-itself-but-take-me-as-I-am Inside Daisy Clover. It is restrained in its fresh treatment of faces, real faces in a real New York School, the claustrophobia of the corridors and the hectic devotion you must have to be a teacher.

Sandy Dennis' Sylvia Barrett, is a perfect realisation of novelist Bel Kaufmans character. She is lovely and frail and does not at all live up to the expectations of her "twitching mannerisms," depicted in Mad, and referred to in the best of unwholesome American reviews.

Her method style, nervousness, stuttering, at times unable to express her words clearly against the screaming class, gives the film its true style. It catches the class off-guard time and time, particularly the students who's lives suddenly seem to depend on her words and how she expresses them.

The bad boy (a too handsome Jeff Howard) continues to be bad despite her worries and trouble-talks; sad little Alice (Ellen O'Mara) unable to express her love of fellow teacher/slob (Patrick Bedford) leaps out a window; the "Me" who writes birthday congratulations to himself in the question box reveals his identity (Jose Rodriguez as himself!) after the class mock-trial.

Bells and buzzers are heard continuously at Calvin Coolidge, and a voice eternally shrieks "Disregard All Bells!' Exterior New York is exquisitely muted through Joe Coffey's camerawork, and there's a touching pleasant score of ocarina, guitar, flute by Fred Karlin.

It is a most natural and entertaining little (just over two hours!) film, and I am in debt, and say thank you, to Warners for giving Wellington its first NZ release, regardless of the uncontrollable nature of that black Cod's eternal coming, preventing the release of Accident (if ever), Camelot, Charge of the Light Brigade, and here we go again for '69 with Guess who's coming to Dinner? You should be able to.