Up the Down Staircase is a skillful culling of memorable moments from Bel Kaufman's novel about a teacher's struggle in a New York "problem-area" high school. They have been assembled by Writer Tad Mosel and Director Robert Mulligan into an entertainment of high spirits, its sheen unscratched by the book's real point.
Sandy Dennis plays Tyro Schoolmarm Sylvia Barrett and re-creates with considerable grace her abandonment of college-bred tenets and concepts to cope with realities in the concrete jungle. Both antagonistic forces—a bunch of surly, underprivileged kids on one side and a school administration of monolithic obtuseness on the other—abound in stereotypes: the unloved Fat Girl, the sullen boy with a streak of buried brilliance, the love-hungry spinster, the platitude-spinning principal and his vicious, misanthropic assistant.
But they are stereotypes only because they exist profusely in life, as Novelist Kaufman came to realize in her 17 years of teaching. Her book is more than a gallery of grotesques; it evokes the frustration of the teacher smothered under a mountain of paperwork created by today's urban educational bureaucracies. In presenting the gallery without the guts, the producers offer an attractive movie while overlooking a potentially important one.
Even so, Staircase is a superior example of its genre. Much of its impact comes from Director Mulligan's eye for setting and atmosphere. His Calvin Coolidge High is an actual Manhattan school building, its rust and raunch unretouched for the camera, and his neighborhood is a horrifyingly typical New York slum street. His supporting cast, notably Sorrell Booke as the exasperated principal and Florence Stanley as a guidance counselor in love with instant evaluation, is ideal. So is Fred Karlin's musical score, in its ironic blending of baroque blandness and jungle throb.
In the end, however, it is the kids themselves who provide the ring of truth. Mulligan did his casting on the city's streets, and coaxed from a group of inexperienced youngsters (some of whom showed up for work with switchblades) a series of magnificent life studies. One unforgettable moment: Ellen O'Mara as the Fat Girl, at a school dance in the arms of the English teacher (Patrick Bedford) she idolizes, her square pudding face aglow in awe and beatification. At such moments, rare in cinematic annals, the camera uses unadorned reality as its point of departure and comes around full circle.