Up the Down Staircase

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Up the Down Staircase  (1967)

Adapted by Tad Mosel (All the Way Home) from the bestselling autobiographical novel by Bel Kaufman, this poignant social drama follows the education of a young English teacher (Sandy Dennis) assigned to a tough New York City high school.  Dennis, perfectly cast here in the lead role soon after her Academy Award-winning supporting performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), brings an endearing vulnerability to the realistic setting of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that is failing its troubled students.  At once a timely indictment of America's crumbling public education infrastructure of the late 1960s as well as a moving tale of female empowerment.

35mm, color, 124 min.  Production: Park Place Productions. Distribution: Warner Bros.  Director: Robert Mulligan.  Producer: Alan J. Pakula.  Screenwriter: Tad Mosel.  Based on a novel by Bel Kaufman.  Cinematographer: Joseph Coffey.  Editor: Folmar Blangsted.  Music: Fred Karlin.  Cast: Sandy Dennis, Patrick Bedford, Eileen Heckart, Jean Stapleton, Ruth White.