Camp in the Classroom

By RICHARD CORLISS

Hands folded on your desktops, children. Johnny, kill the lights. It's 1951, and we're going to watch a film that will show us how to behave like young ladies and gentlemen.

At first, it must have seemed like indoor recess. Instead of long division, kids thought, we get to see a movie! Then the one-reel drama began, and all pleasure ended. Nick, the antihero of Benefits of Looking Ahead, foresees his future as a lonely bum--unless he builds a table in Shop. In Habit Patterns, Barbara sobs because she's a slob ("You make a pretty picture," the catty narrator says, "with your rumpled skirt, your spotted sweater and your hair in a tizzy"). John, in Narcotics: Pit of Despair, takes that first fatal drag on a joint and instantly becomes a heroin addict. What could be spookier? A Date with Your Family, in which five pod people purporting to be a suburban family sit down to dinner. "Pleasant, unemotional conversation," we are told, "helps digestion." Hey, what is this? Stalin's Russia?

No, Ike's America, in the last era when adults ran things, knew they knew better and wanted kids to be just like them. Social-guidance films, the postwar spawn of progressive educators and Grade-D auteurs, taught kids how to be popular and to say no, to think fast and to drive slowly. These beguiling curios have been fodder for documentaries (The Atomic Cafe, with the "duck-and-cover" Civil Defense shorts), for compilation reels (Sex Hygiene Scare Films from Something Weird Video) and for the canny gibe artists of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Now they've been rescued and re-appraised by cultural critic Ken Smith in a droll, provocative study and accompanying video, Mental Hygiene: Classroom Films 1945-1970 (both issued by Blast Books).

A few major studios created classroom epics: Disney's 1946 cartoon The Story of Menstruation (no, Minnie's not in it) and Warner's 1962 poli-scare film Red Nightmare. You'll see a teenage Dick York (the first Darren on TV's Bewitched) as a "shy guy" who wins friends by sharing his radio-building expertise, and young Jack Lemmon, in Once Too Often, as a smug suburbanite headed for a sickening car crash. Sex Hygiene, a 1942 VD film with gross-out closeups of pustulant penises and bizarre soaping rituals, was directed for the Navy by no less than John Ford.

But the typical mental-hygiene film has all the earnest artlessness of an Ed Wood psychodrama. And those sweet, distressed faces belong to volunteer teen actors in Glenview, Ill. (home of Coronet Films, which produced some 500 instructionals just in the '50s), and Lawrence, Kans. (Centron Films). That's one appeal of these pictures today: their mid-American isolation from mainstream movie glamour, even as they aped Hollywood's techniques of storytelling and propaganda.

The films' tone varied: they could teach with a smile, a scowl or a sneer. Some had progressive messages, favoring family planning, opposing witch hunts and racial prejudice. Others could leave lasting scars. Sid Davis' socio-splatter movies often ended in violent death, simply because a boy had driven too fast or hitched a ride with a homosexual. In Davis' babes-in-bandage Live and Learn, kids get impaled on scissors, blinded by BB blasts, or run over while playing baseball on the street. If only they'd watched this movie...

There's nothing wrong with telling a kid to hang up his clothes or help with the dishes. But maybe the instructo-entertainment complex is better at teaching a child bad things (because they look cool) than nice things (because they look drippy). After two decades of social indoctrination by classroom movies, kids were dressing more sloppily and taking more drugs. Instead of running for Student Council, they were protesting the Vietnam war.

Indeed, if one were of the paranoid mind-set fomented by duck-and-cover cartoons and the Sid Davis oeuvre, one might believe that educators of a radical bent designed these films as reverse social engineering. They knew that kids would take dating dos as don'ts, and vice versa. Some children may never even have considered slouching until Posture Pals told them not to. Did the mental-hygiene cinema of the '50s create the hippies and druggies of the '60s?

Well, did it, class? Let's discuss.