Ten years after the end of World War II, writer-director Richard Brooks' film, The Blackboard Jungle (1955) was released. The film remains as a moody, entertaining potboiler and an early formula for treating a theme—the rehabilitating education of delinquents and the inner-city underprivileged—that was still being explored in the cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. Films as diverse as the serious and specific Stand and Deliver (1988, Edward James Olmos played the beleaguered teacher), the comedic Renaissance Man (1994, Danny de Vito), and the sentimental Dangerous Minds (1995, Michelle Pfeiffer), can all find their origins in The Blackboard Jungle, which, although not a particularly masterful film, was unique in its time, and became a cultural marker in a number of respects. It is popularly remembered as the first movie ever to feature a rock 'n' roll song (Bill Haley and the Comets, "Rock around the Clock...