Nevertheless, for all its postwar morality, Vic Morrow's surly Artie West is the film's real antihero, leather-jacketed and blank, the logical heir to Marlon Brando's Wild One of just two years earlier.
Others try and fail, like the pitiful Mr Edwards whose prized 78s are smashed by his class in a symbolic and still upsetting act of rebellion, but hope exists in the form of African-American Gregory Miller, who finally responds to Dadier's patrician authority. Nearly 60s years later it still packs a punch, with Glenn Ford's Richard Dadier (so called mainly to allow the jive-talking students to call him 'Daddy-O') struggling to control his pupils at the fictional North Manual high school. Today, it is the least shocking aspect of a film that touches on knife crime, drug use and even rape within the state school system, but back then it was a touchstone for disaffected youth, never mind the fact that Haley was a journeying white musician in his 30s and the song was already a year old.
The reason for such shocking behaviour wasn't so much the film's content, which today garners a more sober 12 rating, but because of the use of Bill Haley and the Comets' early rock'n'roll hit Rock Around the Clock, which played over the opening credits.
