The reverberations of Blackboard Jungle are hard to imagine in our rock-saturated world, but at the time of its 1955 release, the inclusion of Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock" under the opening credits seemed to shake the worldat least for teenagers. According to Douglas K. Daniel's Tough as Nails: The Life and Films of Richard Brooks (published by University of Wisconsin Press), the film's director urged the studio, MGM, to buy all rights to the recording. They refused, and "Rock Around the Clock" became one of the opening shots in a cultural revolution, the first rock'n'roll record to top the charts.
In his biography, Daniel assembles other reasons to believe that Brooks was just that kind of guy, prescient if not always persuasive and dedicated to his particular vision of cinematic realism. Daniel also quotes many of the director's detractors, including cast and crew who found him cold and difficult. At least one of them thought Brooks' distance and show of contempt resulted from shyness.
Whether or not he was well liked, many of Brooks' films were remarkable. "Making the same type of movie again and again would have bored him and left him feeling unchallenged," Daniel writes and the filmography supports him. Brooks directed social problem films (Blackboard Jungle), an anti-western western (The Last Hunt), working class family drama (The Catered Affair), upper class sexual drama (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) and classic literature adaptations (The Brothers Karamazov).
Brooks was a leftist determined to use the stories he filmed to comment on society and move it forward. By the time of his steep decline in the '80s, he was unhappy with the direction of America. "Kid, this is not the world I was working on," he told Robert Blake. He would probably have grown even unhappier over the last few years, both with politics and the dumb-down direction of Hollywood. Brooks was an example of how the old studio system sometimes facilitated great talent and great work.
