MovieChat Forums > Rebel Without a Cause (1955) Discussion > American schools

American schools

posted 13 years ago by kkhsiivonen
4 replies | jump to latest

When I watched the film, I realized the school look exactly like every other school in US and Canadian movies and TV shows. I mean stuff like Hallway walls full of lockers etc. I live in Finland so I have no idea what schools out there look like. So I just wanted to know if american schools really look like that, or is it a movie standard?

EDIT: If the schools are really that generic, I don't expect you to understand what I mean, unless you've seen foreign schools.

EDIT 2: Just to give a point of comparison, I've been to a lot of schools in Finland and visited several others, and only one I've sen even having hallway lockers, and even there you had to look for them to find them. Most hallways are dominated by chairs, couches and tables, where people can hang out and wait for class to begin. That's also what they look like in modern Finnish movies. 50-60 years ago in movies schools had empty hallways with only places to hang coats In fact that's more or less what they look liked in my childhood too.

[–] 13 years ago

[deleted]

[–] sarah-103 11 years ago

That's a pretty typical set-up for a high-school hallway. Not every hallway has lockers, but many do.

"Forget reality, give me a picture"-Remington Steele

[–] mandrake62 11 years ago

The lockers served two purposes.

A place to put a jacket or coat and other articles not neede while attending classes.

Since students had about 5 or 6 classes classes in different rooms and used a different text book for each classes, they need a rplace to put the books not needed in a given class. Otherwise, they would be lugging 5 or 6 heavy text books from class to class and nobody used back packs back then.

[–] rmanlius 11 years ago

Every American school I've ever been to, including my own, my kids', and others I've visited, look like this one (as well as those from other movies and TV shows).

Finnish schools must have wider halls. There's no room for furniture in American halls and they would become a safety issue during an evacuation.

When I was in school (last century), students hung out in the cafeteria, gym, library, and outdoor areas during breaks. Of course we did see each other in the halls, too, and everybody stopped to talk briefly, but there wasn't much time because everybody was going somewhere else when you saw them in the hall.