Halls of Anger Reviews

Though HALLS OF ANGER is not strictly a sports film, basketball plays a crucial role in this socially conscious drama about school desegregation. Black English teacher Quincy Davis (Calvin Lockhart) is reassigned from the all-white suburban high school where he's been teaching to a tough, 3000-student inner-city school, where he's promoted to vice principal and charged with maintaining order when some 60 of his former students are bused in. He does his best to stem the rising tide of racial conflict and when a white student (Jeff Bridges) meets with violent opposition while trying to make the basketball team, Davis, a former basketball player, puts everything on the line in a game of one-on-one with J.T. Watson (James A. Watson, Jr,), the leader of the black kids who want to keep Douglas off the team. Paul Bogart's direction is tight, the cinematography is gritty and realistic, and the acting is uniformly strong, with Lockhart especially good as the teacher caught up in a volatile situation.