Teachers

Arthur Hiller followed up his dreary 1984 Steve Martin comedy, The Lonely Guy, with this institutional comedy that should have scored at least a B- but barely managed to pass at all despite an incredible A-level cast. Nick Nolte as a formerly idealistic teacher who is now just trying to ensure kids can read when they graduate; JoBeth Williams is his former student, now a lawyer, who is suing the school for graduating a kid who cannot read; Allen Garfield is the terrified teacher who passed the kid who is now suing the school; Ralph Macchio is a student who also can't read whom Nolte is trying to reach; Crispin Glover is a schizophrenic, kleptomaniac whom Macchio is trying to reach; Judd Hirsch is the vice principal who compromised his ideals so often that he's lost them completely; Lee Grant as the superintendent whose determined to settle the lawsuit before it gets to court; Morgan Freeman is the school’s lawyer; William Schallert is the school's ineffectual principal; Steven Hill is Williams' impressively soft-spoken boss a the law firm; Royal Dano is a teacher so ineffectual he sleeps through all classes; Art Metrano is a predatory gym teacher who knocks up a junior, Laura Dern; and Richard Mulligan is an outpatient from a mental institution who gets mistaken for a substitute teacher and placed in charge of a history class that he makes into the best educational experience any of the kids in this school have. The soundtrack is loaded with almost as many '80s rockers as the cast is stuffed with great actors.

Yet with all this talent, the best thing about Teachers is the clever key art on the poster and soundtrack album—an apple on a teacher's desk with a lit fuse sticking out of it like a bomb. Whatever marketing genius came up with that image was pretty brilliant, as it invokes both the idea of a bomb left by a kid in the guise of the traditional fruit students give their teachers and a metaphor for someone in the teaching profession coming to the end of the long fuse of their career. The movie explores the idea that "these kids today" are just too hard to handle and that even the best teachers will inevitably burn out after decades of such a difficult job. It's a worthy and intriguing subject that would have worked better as either a broad farce or a more hard-hitting drama.

The film was directed by Arthur Hiller, who had a string of major hits in the 1970s like The Out-of-Towners, Love Story, Plaza Suite, Silver Streak, and The In-Laws, but whose career floundered in the early '80s with Making Love, Author! Author!, Romantic Comedy, and The Lonely Guy. Hiller was beloved by powerful screenwriters who wanted their directors to just "shoot the damn script!" which is why Paddy Chayefsky got along so well with him on his 1971 dark satirical comedy The Hospital. Since Hiller directed that wonderfully cynical absurdist film, I think critics and audiences expected Teachers to do for public high school education what The Hospital did for big city medical institutions. But The Hospital had Chayefsky; Teachers was written by W. R. McKinney, and it is his only credit. I assume McKinney was an actual teacher inspired to write a screenplay about his experiences and those of his fellow middle-aged colleagues who were idealistic young folks in the 1960s when they entered the noble profession but became disillusioned by the daily grind of years working in an inner-city high school. However, I can't be sure of this, as I've not been able to find much out about the writer, though there is a W.R. McNeill Elementary School in Bowling Green, Kentucky—same guy?