Sidney Poitier returns to an inner-city classroom in this telepic sequel to the popular 1967 feature “To Sir With Love.” Despite the classy efforts of Poitier, helmer Peter Bogdanovich and some vibrant young actors, audiences will be miles ahead of the story, having watched too many other school dramas matriculate on the big and small screens.
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Mark Thackeray (Poitier), born and raised in Guyana, has finished a 30-year teaching stint in London’s East End. Pic opens with a trip down memory lane at his retirement party. Shots from the first movie are spliced in, and a grown-up Lulu has a cameo reprising the original’s title song.
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Thackeray announces his plan to teach Stateside at the Chicago high school overseen by a friend (Daniel J. Travanti). He’s slated for honors history, but the position teaching the remedial section — filled with troubled youth — opens, and he eagerly fills it.
Two brothers are neck-high in gang activity, one student is pimping for a voluptuous classmate, and the levels of self-esteem are pitifully low, despite displays to the contrary. “Sir” gets them to discuss “who they are,” and the course becomes a series of symposia on the importance of self-respect. “Be polite” is the chief lesson imparted.
Thackeray intervenes in a couple of specific cases, lining up jobs and dispensing fortifying advice. Crisis comes when he refuses to rat on a student whose gun he confiscates.
Subplot involves his ulterior motive for going to Chicago — the search for an American woman (Cheryl Lynn Bruce) he romanced as a young man in Guyana. When he finds her, their encounter changes his life, though his reaction is fairly muted.
Viewers will anticipate most every turn and a good many lines in Philip Rosenberg’s script. Thackeray gets scorn from the kids for his “deep caring line of crap” while pleading with Travanti’s bureaucratic principal, “I’m trying to open up their minds.”
Poitier smiles knowingly when delivering a line that refers to the 1955 feature “Blackboard Jungle,” a seminal urban school drama in which he played an angry student.
Looking well-heeled for a teacher and marshaling his typically elegant demeanor, Poitier does polished work. Teach is cool under fire but there’s a seething passion underneath.
Bogdanovich moves things along at a good pace, squeezing the most out of familiar situations and getting the maximum from young actors in stereotypical roles. Christian Payton is affecting as an angry but salvageable hoodlum.
With Thackeray deciding to stay in Chicago and a female colleague seemingly making moves on him, the door is left open for the story to continue.
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