Review of Educating Rita by Willy Russel and its themes
             With tonight's movie, "Educating Rita", I'd kind of like to make a case for a strong sub-genre within the major film genres, and that's the school genre. I think we've got so many movies about school simply because we all have such strong memories and feelings about that time in our lives. Now, the sub-genre consists of a lot of little conventions. For example, it seems like English and Math are the subjects that most appear in this sub-genre. It seems to be the kind of subjects that students continue to be the most afraid of. We've also got the inspiring teacher convention, with movies like "Goodbye Mr. Chips" and "To Sir With Love", things like that. And we've got the unruly students. Essentially, the diamonds in the rough. They've got great potential, but they have to be moulded or shaped somehow. And we get a very large range in this sub-genre. We have light comedies like "Summer School" and serious movies like "Lean on Me". What it's all about though, is socialization and accommodation. How do these students learn to get along in the real world? In a lot of ways that's what movies are essentially about. Trying to teach us how to accommodate or socialize ourselves into the larger structures we exist in.
             This movie is about how the class struggle comes to the classroom. You'd think that England would be an ideal place to talk about class struggle in the school system. But, when you look at other movies in this teacher sub-genre, we see that there are ghettos in the U.S. where this class system is still in place, as much as Americans, and Canadians for that fact, might not want to admit it. What we've got is a bit of a retelling of the story of "Pygmalion", you know, "My Fair Lady", all that sort of thing. Where we have an educated man who tries to teach an uneducated woman about the finer things in life, except that in this case, we've got a very reluctant teacher in Frank ...