Up the Down Staircase is a 1967 American drama film directed by Robert Mulligan and starring Oscar winners Sandy Dennis and Eileen Heckart, along with Patrick Bedford and Jean Stapleton.

The film's title is a reference to the double staircases inside a public, overcrowded New York City high school of 3,000 students of various races and ethnicities, many of whom are troubled and disadvantaged; a few are gang members.

The students include Alice, who has a crush on a male teacher and narrowly avoids death after jumping out a school window; Linda, who is physically abused by her father; Joe, who is on court probation and has a high I.Q.

Her beaming enthusiasms, her startled hesitations, her grave alarms, her humors and indignations and her air of intense sincerity acquaint us with a genuine, loving person we can believe wants to find her pupils' wounds and, what's more, try to heal them – which she can't, and that's the sadness of it all.

"[7] Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin called the film a "very, very, very good movie" and wrote: "It is at once warm and chilling, tough and sentimental, greatly moving, notably honest, improvisationally fresh, wryly and ribaldly funny, disturbing yet infused with a quantity of optimism no larger than the human heart.

... What finally unifies them is their joint indictment of pedagogic attitudes which push methods and merchandise so unrelated to students' real interests and needs as to spark only rebellion or apathy.

The website's consensus reads: "While it occasionally approaches its source material from the wrong direction, Up the Down Staircase remains a worthy story that benefits from Sandy Dennis' strong performance.