Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)

SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Based upon James Hilton's excellent novella of the same name, "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" is a now-overlooked masterpiece of both comic and dramatic filmmaking. Telling the tale of a life well lived, this is a heartfelt character study produced with the utmost excellence. Directed by underrated classic filmmaker Sam wood (the director of "A Night at the Opera", another one of my *FAVORITE*, and I do not use that term lightly, films of all time) the tender classic is adapted well to the screen. Both works are equal in quality, as Hilton's wonderful and witty writings come to life with even more depth than they originally contained. The cast all delivers marvelous performances, and even the numerous child actors are realistic and delightful to watch (something too rarely seen in the movies, especially back in 1939!). Of course, the main attraction (in terms of acting, anyway) is the leading performance by classical Hollywood celebrity Robert Donat. Donat embodies the unforgettable character of Mr. Chips with all of the humor and melancholy desperately required for the role. sometimes he comes across as a bumbling, goofy old man, and at other times he comes across as a sweet and sensitive lover. This film traces the highlights of his career as a schoolteacher and it does so in a way that made tears flow from my eyes like a steady stream (of embarrassment) and laughter fly from my throat like a speeding train (similes are hard to think of sometimes, okay?). Anyway, the point is: go see this movie, it is at once hilarious, heartwarming, sad, and, in the end, truly hopeful and surprisingly inspiring. The acting is great on all fronts (I did not even mention the lovely Greer Garson, whose performance makes her character as charming and likable as she is beautiful) and the story is adapted in such a way that the original story is not at all ruined and is, instead, made even better! After forcing any possible reader to struggle through my parenthesis addiction (see, I just did it again!), I can only ask that you all forgive me and run out to read the classic novella and immediately view this beautiful and comic film adaptation. Those who bare sensitive souls and healthy hearts will surely lack any disappointment and leave the film with tears in their eyes and a smile on their face!

Donat's performance is/was spectacular as always and that alone would make this film worth the watch. Hollywood has always had a rough time depicting England. It all turns out to be so terribly, terribly English that it makes fun of the country and its inhabitants without actually intending to do harm. In other words "Ye Olde Englande" according to the American establishment all too often makes the culture look quite silly. Whether part of this is indeed planned or not, it doesn't help out the English cause at the outset of World War II by making the people and their society seem so miserably anachronistic. "Cuddly" isn't a word appropriate to a country soon to be besieged by war. Certainly Hollywood could have done better.

If somebody doesn't teach the children, our society and our culture dies out in one generation. That makes teaching THE necessary profession. Without teachers, we have nothing, we can do nothing, we are nothing. And there is no profession more thankless, more under-compensated, more maligned, and more difficult. Why would anyone do it? For the best answer available, watch this version of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips".First and foremost, a young (33 years old) plays a British boy's school master, from he first day at school, through decades of boys, through his retirement and his dotage. Donat brilliant captures Mr. Chippings' awkward beginning, his fumbling to find himself as a teacher, his growing comfort in his own skin, largely courtesy of Katherine, a lovely young woman whom he meets while lost in the mountains on a summer vacation hike; whom he marries, and loses to childbirth. Donat ages brilliantly and believably.Greer Garson plays Katherine, with all the loveliness and grace that characterized her life and career. Paul Henried is the German teacher, Staefel, who persuades Chipping to take the vacation where he meets his Kathie, who must leave Britain for his home in Germany when the two countries get embroiled in World War I, whom Chipping, to the consternation of many, memorializes when Staefel dies fighting for Germany in the war.But watch the boys. Little Terry Kilburn plays each of the Colley boys as little ones, with heart-breaking cuteness. Watch the boys grow, watch how they come to love Chipping, and how he loves them.Keep the Kleenex box handy, and end up envying Chips his life, though we pity him almost throughout. He is the most blessed of human beings. He is a teacher! God bless them all.

The central moral of the film is declared very early on: that, through the love of a good woman, Chips learns that the path to teaching success and fulfilment is to become the pupils' friend.Current teacher training policy, at least in England and Wales, is that the teacher should NEVER try to be the pupils' friend. You would almost certainly fail to qualify as a PGCE teacher if you did.That said, this is a touching movie, even if there are several mawkish moments. The school song has been deliberately composed to tug at the heart strings; the scene in which Chips insists on conducting a Latin class despite having just heard his wife and unborn baby have died is simply appalling. The dialogue designed to tell the story or illustrate the passage of the years is ridiculously unsubtle.But Greer Garson is gorgeous in this, and Donat is touching. If only school was still like this!