To Sir, with Love is a 1967 British drama film that deals with social and racial issues in a secondary school in the East End of London.
It stars Sidney Poitier and features Christian Roberts, Judy Geeson, Suzy Kendall, Patricia Routledge and singer Lulu making her film debut.
The film's title song "To Sir with Love", sung by Lulu, peaked at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart for five weeks in the autumn of 1967 and ultimately was the best-selling single in the US that year; meanwhile, Poitier, playing a charismatic schoolteacher to troubled youth, was the first black actor to win a Golden Globe Award.
The pupils, led by Bert Denham and Pamela Dare, behave badly: their antics range from vandalism to distasteful pranks.
Thackeray retains a calm demeanour but loses his temper after discovering something being burned in the classroom stove, which turns out to be a girl's sanitary towel.
When mixed-race student Seales' white English mother dies, the class takes a collection for a wreath but refuses to accept Thackeray's donation.
"[2] The film was shot in Wapping (including the railway station) and Shadwell in the East End of London, in the Victoria and Albert Museum and at Pinewood Studios.
[6] The spire of the church is visible in the film, when Sir walks up Reardon Street, en route to the funeral for the mother of his student.
[6] The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "There is one shot in To Sir, With Love that shows Sidney Poitier staring into the sun through the window of his empty classroom with his arms spread out along the sill; in silhouette he looks for a second like Christ on the cross.
The effect is almost certainly unintentional, but everything about James Clavell's sententious script ... suggests that he sees his hero as a Saviour figure, nobly sacrificing his own chance of middle-class respectability in order to redeem younger unfortunates from their hereditary taint of bad grammar and colourful language.
Buttoned inside his immaculate white collars, Thackeray bravely shoulders the black man's burden, emitting a sanctimonious wince when confronted with any sign of moral weakness in others .... His comportment is infuriating, but no more so than the way in which the other characters respond to it.
For if the film pretends to social realism by its frequent allusions to race prejudice, broken homes, ill-equipped classrooms and so on, its solutions have all the facile optimism of the most utopian folksongs.
With scarcely a pimple or a genuine adolescent problem between them (there are no wallflowers at this school dance) they are all swept along to respectability on a great tidal wave of saccharine sentiment.
Nonetheless, within the limits imposed by the pious script, unimaginative photography and wooden direction, Christian Roberts and Lulu provide two very engaging performances.
Although he controls himself with difficulty in some of his confrontations with his class, and even flares up on one occasion, he never acts like a boor, the way one of his fellow teachers (played by Geoffrey Bayldon) does.
[10] The Time Out Film Guide says that it "bears no resemblance to school life as we know it" and the "hoodlums' miraculous reformation a week before the end of term (thanks to teacher Poitier) is laughable".
[15] Despite the character of Mark Thackeray being a leading role, the film has been criticised in modern times for Poitier's portrayal of the Magical Negro trope.