Up the Down Staircase | Full Movie | Movies Anywhere

Name: Up the Down Staircase
Released: 1967-6-30
Cast: Sandy Dennis, Patrick Bedford, Eileen Heckart, Ruth White, Jean Stapleton

Up the Down Staircase

UR
2h 4m
1967

78%

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The first mistake this pretty young teacher made was to get off the bus. The second was to walk into Calvin Coolidge High School for the first time. The third was to fall in love with it. Up The Down Staircase follows the story of a feisty rookie educator who passionately teaches a group of New York inner-city students, encouraging them to rise above their circumstances. Based on the best selling novel by Bel Kaufman.

Director:

Robert Mulligan

Producer:

Alan J. Pakula

Writer:

Tad Mosel

Cast:

Sandy Dennis, Patrick Bedford, Eileen Heckart, Ruth White, Jean Stapleton, Sorrell Booke

Rotten Tomatoes® Score

TOMATOMETER®

78%

Critics Consensus: 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.

Reviews

LIFE

Richard Schickel

Up the Down Staircase is one of those rare films in which all the important talents mesh to form a wonderfully coherent, humane and sensitive vision of an aspect of our reality.

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.

As the fledgling teacher, Sandy Dennis is big-sisterish and convincingly pitying in the part of Miss Barrett. She is the epitome of that contemporary yet ancient phenomenon: the dedicated mentor with the maternal instinct.

We need more American films like Up the Down Staircase. We need more films that might be concerned, even remotely, with real experiences that might once have happened to real people. And we need more actresses like Sandy Dennis.

In the final examination it is like the student who gets an average grade when he's capable of a 95 -- the underachiever.

July 5, 2022

FULL REVIEW