Bowie: A Biography - JFK247

you can look sharp and still be a badass, the Teds
roamed London in gangs, vandalizing and
tormenting straights but mostly fighting each other
like the American juvenile delinquent gangs who
were rapidly becoming a cottage industry, both in
terms of selling to them and selling cautionary tales
about them. The best among these cautionary tales
was the film Blackboard Jungle.
Released in 1955, Blackboard Jungle purports to
be a cautionary tale but is really the godfather of all
exploitation “teachers vs. students” movies, from
Rock ’n’ Roll High School to Heathers to
Dangerous Minds. Glenn Ford plays an openminded
English teacher. Sidney Poitier is the
smartest of the troubled teens. They form an unlikely
bond that helps them both deal with the surly,
hopeless, chain-smoking teens around them. The
language is pulpy (“You ever try to fight thirty-five
guys at once, teach?”). Librarians are sexually
ravaged, jazz records are violently critiqued and the
generation gap between World War II veterans and
their increasingly existentially hopeless offspring has
its first black and white document.
Blackboard Jungle, most important, blasts wide
open with “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and
the Comets. The song, already a few years old,
quickly became a Teddy Boy anthem and the first
rock ’n’ roll single to sell one million copies on both
sides of the Atlantic. Blackboard Jungle and its
soundtrack caused a few incidents of violence in and
around the actual cinemas where it screened, and