To Sir, with Love (1967)

To Sir, with Love (1967)

7/10

Starring
Sidney Poitier


Directed by James Clavell

There is no denying it that Sidney Poitier is one of the best actors to have graced the screen. His grace, his demeanor and his style of delivery is nothing but grand. To Sir, with Love is another great movie he did, which if you have not had the privilege of seeing I ask that you do so now.

They have been many movies that has the lead come into a school where ruffians have control of the way things are run and the man makes a dramatic change in the way things happen in the school.

What makes me prefer this to those other ones is, they make the students like overgrown onions who only responds to violence. From my little experience teaching I can boldly say those movies are always hyping the way teenagers relate with authority. Maybe they do this to give the movies more dramatic effects, but in this movie the dramatic effect can be seen in the simple ways the lead character Mark Thackeray (Sidney Poitier) changes the children’s way of thinking.

I have seen other Popular Poitier movies like the ones he did with Bill Cosby, In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) all great movies which I will also add this one.

To Sir, with Love is a 1967 drama movie that I heard about on Twitter one night and decided to give it a twirl.

The movie will forever be an iconic movie which you can see anytime, the plot and the events in the movie will have me giving this movie a second helping sooner than later.

The movie plot has an out of work engineer named Mark Thackeray desperate in need for a job. After searching for jobs as an engineer and not finding any he decided to take up teaching and his first teaching job is at the North Quay Secondary School in the tough East End of London. The students there are known for making the lives of the teachers unbearable, and his students were the most notorious as they were in their finals.

Mark first started easy taking the children through the syllabus until they turned on him making him lose his temper one morning. He then decided from then on to change the way he approached them. He changed the class syllabus to talking about life, he shared his life experience with the children and soon a bond was made. The bond was not strong enough though, because no matter how much he tried to teach them to be responsible, life and the pains that come with it was not on his or the pupils side.

To Sir, with Love, a classic.