Conrack

I not only consider this to be the best film that Jon Voight (Midnight Cowboy, Coming Home) has ever done, but a real tribute to teachers.

Despite incredible odds, Pat Conroy (Voight) managed to reach a group of students and bring them from nowhere to a basic literacy and awareness of the world. His methods made be criticized by bureaucratic dinosaurs like Mr. Skeffington (Hume Cronyn), but teachers like Conroy will always be winners.

Voight really showed that he had a love for teaching and that it was a natural high for him. He didn't overplay the role, and I found him to be totally believable. Voight is Conrack.

Besides a love of teaching, we also see another important point in this film. No matter how good you are at your job, if you rock the boat, the bureaucrats will get you.

Pat Conroy must be an interesting guy. It's easy to be progressive in, say, Milwaukee. (In fact, you had BETTER be.) But he evidently grew up in the South, military family, attended the Citadel, and then finally found his head different from most of the others in his community. Social friction in the South is nothing to mess with. No, sir. He's writing good novels and letters to the editor. I admire him tremendously. The movie reminds me of a lesson in an introductory philosophy class, about the fallacy of arguing by analogy. Time is like a river, you see, and you can travel back in time because you can paddle upstream in a river. Conrack gives us a little trip into the past, when things were even worse than they are now. The African-American kids he's teaching don't know what country they live in, or the name of the ocean lapping at the shores of their little island. (Perhaps now overgrown with expensive condos.) He paints himself as an inspiring teacher. He can't help it. He was callow, and anyway autobiographies don't have much choice -- they're either hagiographic or honest, and in the second case the author always comes out looking like a Schmuck. Anyhow, in the end he admits failure, though through no fault of his own. John Voight, known for his involvement in sociopolitical issues, is the perfect choice for Conroy's surrogate, and Martin Ritt perhaps the best possible director, given his having lived in the South and coped with it, though his hand slips from time to time and we get black kids answering Conrack's questions in plainsong. The musical score sucks, so when the kids are out on a Halloween spree we have music that belongs in Robin Hood. The photography is good. The film hit a nerve. I was subbing as a teacher in elementary school in the South at one point. My wife at the time was a professor at UNC, Wilmington, and told me matter of factly how she was having lunch with her colleagues and some guy's daughter met him in the cafeteria and told him so enthusiastically about the new substitute teacher they had that day, and it was only after several minutes of conversation that she realized the girl was talking about me. I can't remember many moments in my life when I felt more pleased. Nothing is as exalting as seeing somebody's face light up when they learn something new and extraordinary. I've seen it in kindergarten kids and in Marines at Camp Lejeune, people wincing with pleasure at the dawning of a new realization. As Mel Brooks might say, "It's good to be da teacher." Conrack gets that idea across most effectively.

Martin Ritt seems to be a director who was always interested in social issues (as the son of immigrants, he had every incentive to be so, especially since he was blacklisted in the '50s). "Conrack" is based on Pat Conroy's novel "The Water is Wide", about his own experience in 1969 teaching a school of impoverished black children about the outside world, much to the chagrin of the right-wing superintendent (Hume Cronyn). What added to the movie's strength was the cultural and historical context: Conroy (Jon Voight) frustratedly tells another teacher how many of the children don't know about Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, the Vietnam War, or even where Vietnam is. He proceeds to enlighten them about all these factors.

Somewhere, I read a complaint that when Conroy played music for the children, he only played white music. The truth is, you can't blame the movie for that; it was based on Conroy's real experience. Either way, the movie's a real gem.

Pat Conroy's autobiographical book "The Water Is Wide" proves to be something of a Southern "Up The Down Staircase", yet despite the teacher-going-against-the-odds formula, "Conrack" really does move the audience with each little breakthrough and creative flash. These students (uneducated black kids on an island off South Carolina) are actually shown learning, and their collective wide-eyed innocence is remarkably sweet. The one actual actress in the bunch (Tina Andrews, an amazing performer) plays the "tough nut" Conrack has to crack, and once she falls under his charms, it all seems a breeze. But the story is not ready-made for a happy ending, and I wasn't prepared for the quiet simplicity of the finale. It's beautifully done. The script veers off course every now and then, but director Martin Ritt is very smart to always fall back on Jon Voight's solid presence. Scenes such as the one where he drives around in his van venting his frustrations over a loudspeaker don't add up to much, but the whole film is filled with episodes which spark emotion, and the actual ending is their payoff. **1/2 out of ****

Pat Conroy is one of our most elegant writers, and his first book, a memoir of his adventure teaching a group of heart-breakingly neglected and ignorant black children on an island off the coast of South Carolina should be required upper-class reading for kids who have To Kill a Mockingbird under their belts.

Now, the movie: If you read the book, the movie will seem so Hollywoodized that you'll wonder who "cuted-up" Conrack (the kids' pronunciation for Conroy). Jon Voight is earnest and sweaty, and pulls off Conroy's youthful self-righteousness to a T, but Hume Cronyn is miscast as the evil, bigoted superintendent. The kids are strangely ignored here, although they are complex and fascinating in their own right in the book. Voight's teaching is the best part of this film, but Conroy's explanation to the white citizenry of why he should be retained--after annoying the county school administration for the last time--is destroyed by the ridiculous scene with Voight driving the streets of Buford, using a P.A. system on his hippiemobile to bludgeon bewildered suburbanites.

Hell, watch it anyway.