ALL THE YOUNG MEN: and one tired old Hollywood star

We are talking young young men here. In some cases practically prepubescent judging by their total lack of facial hair despite going several days without access to warm water, shaving cream and a badger's-hair brush.
Comedian Mort Sahl's character is the sole exception. He's got enough beard for all his fellow soldiers put together, even if it is of the Groucho Marx greasepaint mustache variety. But looking like a cartoon heavy has it's compensations because Sahl gets to do five minutes of his stand-up routine to his fellow Marines trapped in an unfeasibly well decorated Korean farmhouse and under attack from a seemingly endless wave of North Korean and Chinese troops during the Korean War.
Something tells me historically accuracy wasn't uppermost in the mind of Hall Bartlett when
he wrote, produced and directed this cheap looking war drama in 1960.
Jumping on a bandwagon or three would seem to have been more of a primary motive, not only pandering to the audiences turned on by Sahl's biting satire and teen heart-throb co-star James Darren's good looks and limited singing ability, but also the growing number of liberals raising their voices against the evils of racism and segregation in American society.
Sidney Poitier is not only the sole African American in the unit but he's left in command when the Lieutenant is killed in an enemy attack. That doesn't go down well with some of the men who can't stomach the idea of taking orders from a Black man. Nor does it sit well with the unit's other Sergeant, Kincaid (played by Alan Ladd), who's older, more experienced - and white.

Kincaid's not a racist - after all you can't have the star spouting the N word even if it for dramatic effect - but he doesn't do anything to discipline the hatemongers. It's a conflict the film chooses to ignore in favour of simplistic posturing by both sides which does nothing to promote serious consideration of the issues.
Kincaid's a challenging character to read. There's a lack of consistency in his response to the various situations he finds himself in, but I suspect that's more down to Bartlett's poor writing than an intriguing complexity in Kincaid's personality. ALL THE YOUNG MEN is not Ladd's finest hour. He looks old, tired and puffy and does little to suggest the confidence that the men put in him is well placed.
Ladd's performance is not helped by some spectacularly sloppy editing. Shots don't match and in several instances multiple seconds worth of action has been snipped out of a scene causing characters to morph from one side of a room to the other without any visible movement.
It all adds up to a tiresome and banal experience devoid of any real points of interest. This is not a film anyone involved in it can be proud of and - in some cases (mentioning no names Mr Bartlett) - should be pretty embarrassed about.

TO SIR, WITH LOVE: unconvincing and dated yet strangely uplifting

Even though much of the story and the acting are unconvincing it's difficult to avoid getting swept up in the liberating sense of empowerment and discovery which flows through this film.
Sidney Poitier is Mark Thackeray, a budding engineer who takes a teaching job at a rundown high school in the East End of London while he waits for something better to come along. He's assigned to a class of rambunctious undisciplined teenagers who can't wait to be finished with school and start adult life. 
The situation presents the inexperienced young teacher with the biggest challenge of his life. Can he win their respect before they break him in the same way they destroyed his predecessor?
The answer is not as hard to discern as screenwriter -director James Clavell might have hoped. This is Sidney Poitier after all. As Hollywood's first black leading man a decade earlier he'd overcome tougher challenges than taming a classroom of gobby teenagers, and established a screen persona for himself as a man of dignity and unyielding determination. 
So the question really is not if but how he's going to teach these kids to respect themselves and others. His chosen method succeeds (producing the lump in the throat of the viewer in the process) as much because the students are poorly drawn stereotypes of troubled teens, as it is because of his calmly authoritative presence.

As Denham, Thackeray's chief antagonist, Christian Roberts gives a piss-poor impression of a leather-jacketed class tough, while a chubby faced Lulu as the class tart looks about ten years too old to still be in school.- and she's not the only one. 
When the main act of rebellion by this bunch of overaged teenagers is staging lunchtime dances in the school hall, one has to wonder what the teachers are all getting so stressed about.
TO SIR, WITH LOVE has not aged well. Even if it bore some slight connection with reality on it's original release in 1967 (and it is only slight. Do we really believe that Poitier was the only non-white in the whole East End?) it now exists as a quaint snapshot of a long ago England as imagined by an outsider (Clavell). Watch it for the pleasure of Poitier's performance but don't fool yourself that you're getting a history lesson on British society.