Stand and Deliver (1988)

(On Cable TV, March 2021) Inspiring-teacher stories are well worn by now, but I suspect that they may not have been so common at the time that Stand and Deliver came out in 1988. Considering the rather large corpus that followed in the same genre in the early 1990s, it’s interesting to go to this earlier example in its rough effectiveness. Filmed with a low budget and plenty of noble intentions, it’s a film that tells the story of a teacher who accepts to teach mathematics in a challenging neighbourhood, where the students are almost entirely uninterested in the course load and plenty of non-academic obstacles threaten their grades. In other words — more or less the same story. But what sets Stand and Deliver apart, even today, is an unusual refusal to make its protagonist glamorous — As played by Edward James Olmos, protagonist Jaime Escalante is a balding, meek, even silly looking. But following the real-life Escalante, Olmos shows that there’s more than one way to tech effectively: He manages to get his students onboard while avoiding the too-familiar strong-arm tactics of lesser movies, and eventually leads his students to great academic success. (Although not in the single year the film portrays!)  Stand and Deliver is familiar and likable at once, with plenty of charm even today — and the added dimension of it being an early example of Latino-made filmmaking is inspiring in itself.