blackboard jungle

Not only did Bill Haley's ''Rock Around the Clock'' kick-start the rock 'n' roll era, it also ushered in what has become a Hollywood staple: the high school movie.

It's become a billion-dollar genre. But if not for that song being woven into Richard Brooks' 1955 classic, ''The Blackboard Jungle,'' we may never have tasted that sweet McLovin that audiences are enjoying today.

''Jungle'' created a genre that has sparked hundreds of imitators, each trying to match the right songs with the right actors and story in hopes of tapping into Hollywood's most lucrative demographic - teens.

And nothing pleases those customers more than movies that speak directly to them, in their language, about their lives, their hopes, their dreams and, most important - their desire to be cool and hip.

Add a soundtrack packed with the most popular songs of the moment, and it becomes a license to print money for the film and recording industries.

While that marriage of music and film has caught on at the multiplex, it has rarely appealed to television viewers. The lone exception, of course, was ''Happy Days.'' But 30 years later, that barrier might finally be cracking, judging by the success of both ''High School Musical'' and ''High School Musical 2,'' which set a basic cable record by attracting more than 17 million viewers for its debut last month on the Disney Channel.

So what if it was little more than a second-rate ''Grease'' set in a modern-day Albuquerque, N.M., high school? It was fun and the songs were hopelessly catchy. But if you really want to cut to the heart of the high school movie genre, I've selected 20 all-time classics that should be a must for every movie buff.

Unlike the high school movie du jour, ''Superbad,'' you can actually watch most of these films with your family. But that doesn't mean they lack edge - most of them have it in spades, even the holy trilogy of ''Sixteen Candles,'' ''The Breakfast Club'' and ''Pretty in Pink,'' which flowed from the mind of John Hughes, before he went on to make the schlocky ''Home Alone.''

Many are comedies or light dramas, but they all possess a pitch-black center that taps into all the angst, ennui and fear that is adolescence. So fire up the DVD player, pop some corn and pass the Clearasil - let's all go back to high school, beginning with the one that started it all.

Forever young

1 - BLACKBOARD JUNGLE (1955) Glenn Ford takes a nonviolent approach to convincing a class of juvenile delinquents that hitting the books is more rewarding than hitting each other. Among the thugs was one Sidney Poitier, who a dozen years later would play Ford's role in the British version of ''Jungle,'' ''To Sir, With Love.''

2 - TO SIR, WITH LOVE (1967) It wasn't enough for the perky blonde Lulu to steal the movie, she also sold zillions of copies of its memorable theme song. Still, Sidney Poitier is more than solid making the transition from the troubled student in ''Jungle'' to the wily teacher dealing out tough love and object lessons about race and tolerance in taming a class of English thugs who turned out not be as tough as they thought they were.

3 - FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982) Just barely out of his teens, Cameron Crowe went undercover at a Los Angeles-area high school to learn firsthand about the students' wants, needs, and desires. He wound up collecting enough juicy insights to write both a book and a screenplay. The rest is history, or more precisely the ''Citizen Kane'' of high school comedies, a treatise on sex, booze and rock 'n' roll, all going down at the local mall. The film also launched several careers, including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, and Sean Penn, who cooked as the hilarious stoned surfer, Jeff Spicoli.

4 - VALLEY GIRL (1983) This low-budget charmer shifted Romeo and Juliet to the age of Reagan with a still baby faced Nicolas Cage and the long forgotten Deborah Foreman playing mismatched lovers from opposite sides of the Hollywood Hills. Frederic Forest and Colleen Camp are terrific as Foreman's parents, an aged couple still living the hippie lifestyle even though they've become far more conservative than they'd care to admit.

5 - AMERICAN PIE (1999) ''There was this one time at band camp, when ...'' Who could ever forget Alyson Hannigan's dead-panning those famous words in the delightfully foul-mouthed ode to teen angst from the Weitz brothers, who've since gone on to make heartfelt adult dramas like ''About a Boy'' and ''In Good Company.'' The plot was standard: four senior boys striving to get laid. But like ''Fast Times'' before it, ''Pie'' was both crusty and sweet.

6 - DAZED AND CONFUSED (1993) Like the current ''Superbad,'' Richard Linklater's cult classic unfolds on one eventful afternoon and evening on the last day of school in Austin, Texas, circa 1976. It was a masterpiece of minimalism, striking many a chord and launching many a career, from Ben Affleck and Matthew McConaughey to Adam Goldberg and Parker Posey.

7 - GREASE (1978) ''Grease'' was the word and remains so when talking about the king of high school musicals. The songs were catchy, leads John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John were gorgeous to look at and the supporting cast from Stockard Channing to Eve Arden was pitch perfect.

8 - THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985) This is just about the perfect high school movie, from its terrific theme song, Simple Minds' ''Don't You Forget About Me,'' to a marvelous cast headed by 1980s icon Molly Ringwald, to the perceptive script by teen movie mastermind John Hughes. The premise was almost sitcom-like in its simplicity - five students of various social strata, meet on a Saturday morning for detention and let rip - but the honesty and emotion that poured forth as they vented solidified the fact that adolescence stinks.

9 - SIXTEEN CANDLES (1984) Molly Ringwald became every adolescent boy's dream girl with her sexy, but wholesome portrayal of the girl next door in this hilarious romp in which she played straight man to a host of kooks, nerds and perverts both at school and at home. Set during the week leading up to her sweet 16, writer-director John Hughes (perfectly capturing the awkwardness of adolescence) exposes her to one humiliation after another, be it a geeky Anthony Michael Hall snatching her underpants or her loopy granny squeezing her chest and exclaiming, ''She's gotten her boobies!'' Worse, her family seems to have forgotten it's her birthday and the high school dreamboat she has her eyes on doesn't seem to know she exists.

10 - PRETTY IN PINK (1986) Like ''The Breakfast Club,'' this capper to the John Hughes-Molly Ringwald high school trilogy boasted of a classic theme song (by Psychedelic Furs), terrific performances and painfully realistic truths about the travails of teenhood. This one was a little more cornball (remember the makeshift prom dress?), but the father-daughter relationship was a real keeper. And who will ever forget Jon Cryer's masterwork as the hopelessly geeky and love struck Duckie?

11 - CARRIE (1976) Who didn't enjoy the visceral jolt of Sissy Spacek exacting revenge on her mean, snooty classmates (including a peach-fuzzy John Travolta) as she drenched them in buckets of blood at senior prom? What else would you expect from the warped mind of Stephen King? But this was no mere horror picture, evidenced by Spacek's resulting Oscar nomination and the film's now classic status. Never had a film so disturbingly captured just how closely high school resembled hell.

12 - HEATHERS (1989) Christian Slater (doing his best Jack Nicholson) and Winona Ryder made for a deliciously evil and cynical couple as they plotted to off a classmate. Along with their two perfectly cast stars, director Michael Lehmann and writer Daniel Waters lacerated every high school cliché with the darkest of black humor.

13 - MEAN GIRLS (2004) Before she was creating ''30 Rock,'' one of the funniest sitcoms on TV, Tina Fey dipped her poisoned pen in the well and came up with this ruthless satire about high school cliques. It pitted a smart, but somewhat nerdy transfer student (a pre-rehab Lindsay Lohan) against her new school's self-proclaimed queen bee, played with requisite venom by Rachel McAdams.

14 - AMERICAN GRAFITTI (1973) Although his later work on something called ''Star Wars'' made George Lucas an icon, I've always felt that this bittersweet ode to friends, cars and hot blondes was by far his greatest achievement. Lucas tapped into something universal and timeless with his day in the life of a dozen Marin County teens in 1963 as they prepared to bid high school goodbye and head into a world that was about to lose its innocence to a lone gunman in a Dallas book depository. Stars of the future abound, with Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Suzanne Somers, Cindy Williams, Mackenzie Phillips and Harrison Ford heading a cast that was as terrific as the soundtrack spun by the late great Wolfman Jack.

15 - REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955) Not only did this low-budget B movie catapult Natalie Wood and James Dean to stardom, it also presented adolescence as something much darker than the hey-let's-have-a-party mentality that prevailed in previous high school movies.

16 - ELECTION (1999) Over-achieving never looked as ugly (or as funny) as it did when it emanated from Reese Witherspoon's perky but ruthless Tracy Flick, who proved that - like a lot of today's politicians - she would stop at nothing to get elected class president. Not even her teacher and advisor (Matthew Broderick looking weary and world-beaten) was immune to her wrath.

17 - RUSHMORE (2004) Wes Anderson, who also directed, and Owen Wilson teamed to write this incredibly goofy but completely engaging comedy about an over-achieving prep school geek (Jason Schwartzman) battling one of the institution's biggest donors (Bill Murray) for the heart of a young widow played superbly by Olivia Williams. The childish pranks the two ''boys'' play on each other are increasingly whacked but the movie never loses its heart.

18 - CLUELESS (1995) Cleverly relocating Jane Austen's ''Emma'' from 18th century England to 20th century Los Angeles was a stroke of genius by writer-director Amy Heckerling (who also helmed that other high school classic ''Fast Times at Ridgemont High''), but it never would have worked without Alicia Silverstone as the incomparable Cher. In her capable hands, Cher's quips and one-liners were as biting as her strong fashion sense.

19 - FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF (1986) When you're in high school, nothing is more sublime than skipping school for a day and going out on the town. Just ask Ferris, the character that made Matthew Broderick a star. Of course, it's a lot more fun when you do it in Chicago, where you can spend an afternoon at the Cubs game with your hot girlfriend and then go tooling around in a red Ferrari that belongs to your best pal's dad. It's also a plus when the story is written and directed by John Hughes, the prom king of high school movies.

20 - FAME (1980) Without this baby, there would probably never have been a ''High School Musical,'' given how this one opened the door to singing and dancing in the classroom. Set in and around New York's prestigious High School for the Performing Arts, director Alan Parker (who went on to make ''The Commitments'') draws you deeply into the chaotic lives of a half-dozen students as they deal with life, love and heartache.