Some of the Best School Films

Sid Davis died earlier this week. For folks who don't know, he produced some of the most popular "social guidance" films for youth in the 50s and 60s, also called "mental hygiene" films that praised the joys of conformity and domesticity and warned of the perils of drugs and reckless behavior anywhere and everywhere (on the road, on the bus and yes even in the lunchroom).

Davis' were low-budget films- most made for less than a grand- but he made enough money selling them to schools and police departments to keep making more and more of them. Some of the best include
Girls Beware in which a young girl, "Judy Miller", is murdered because she's careless about who she trusts (produced with the help of the Inglewood School District and Inglewood Police Department), only to be topped by Boys Beware, which actually came first, about a boy named Jimmy Barnes who also trusts a stranger who is "sick" ("you see he was a homosexual" and "one never knows when a homosexual is about- he may appear normal"). Davis was also big into the anti-drug message and although his films weren't as terrifically comedic as Reefer Madness, his Seduction of the Innocent (not to be confused with the more recent same-named song by KISS) is a pretty over the top account of a young girl whose experimentation with marijuana leads to addiction, death and destruction. Of course, the decade that followed its 1961 release is most known for drug use among youth, which makes you wonder about its effectiveness. And it describes the effect of pot as "everything speeds up to 100 miles per hour", which also clarifies that Davis was not himself experimenting with the drug. At any rate, Davis' films were seen by millions of public school kids in the 50s, 60s and 70s and were chock-full of societal ne'er-do-wells and blood and guts and violence. Reminding us that the good old days had its troubles too. As well as some great film-making.