Goodbye, Mr Chips **** (1939, Robert Donat, Greer Garson, Paul Henreid, Lyn Harding, Austin Trevor, Terry Kilburn, John Mills) – Classic Movie Review 4140

Director Sam Wood’s vintage 1939 drama Goodbye, Mr Chips puts the spotlight on Robert Donat, who won the Best Actor Oscar for his masterly portrayal of a prim and proper classics teacher at a boys’ boarding school, who spends his dull life with the boys until the handsome Katherine (Greer Garson in her first film) coaxes him into real living. The old teacher and former headmaster Mr Chips (full name Charles Edward Chipping) looks back over his long career, recalling pupils and teachers, and the courtship and marriage that changed his life.

The screenplay by R C Sherriff, Claudine West and Eric Maschwitz provides a schmaltzy and nostalgic but very touching stroll through British novelist James Hilton’s popular 1934 novella, taking the quaint pedagogue from timid youth to doddery, respected old age via the Boer War and the First World War.

Wood’s slightly faded film feels overlong at 114 minutes and seems a shade creaky and musty nowadays, and the movie’s handling is dated by today’s standards. But the electrifying  power of the story, dialogue and performances still shines brightly and superbly through.

Goodbye, Mr Chips was made in England at Denham Studios, and produced by the British division of MGM. It still has currency as it was voted the 72nd greatest British film ever in the BFI’s Top Hundred British Films poll.

The film rights to James Hilton’s novella were acquired by MGM head of production Irving Thalberg after literary critic Alexander Wolcott’s praise helped to popularise it in the US. Wood travelled to England to make the film, a unique event in his career, as part of MGM’s plan to accommodate British trade union demands for a share of the US film exports market.

Also in the cast are Paul Henreid, Lyn Harding, Austin Trevor, Terry Kilburn, John Mills, Milton Rosmer, Judith Furse, Frederick Leister, Louise Hampton, David Tree, Edmund Breon. Guy Middleton, Nigel Stock, Scott Sunderland, Ronald Ward, Patrick Ludlow, Simon Lack, Caven Watson, Cyril Raymond, John Longden and Jill Furse.

It was remade as the musical Goodbye, Mr Chips by Herbert Ross in 1969.

In 1944, Sam Wood founded and was first president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an organisation dedicated to seeking out and expelling those people it considered traitorous to American interests. The organisation, formed of management and labour in the film industry, lobbied the House Un-American Activities Committee to examine purported Communist elements in the industry, which it did in 1947. Wood kept a black notebook in which he wrote the names of those he considered subversive. His daughter Jeane Wood said his crusade ‘transformed Dad into a snarling, unreasoning brute’.

After a 1949 meeting of his Motion Picture Alliance when he protested against a liberal screenwriter suing the group for slander, Wood had a fatal heart attack, aged 66. In his will no one could collect their inheritance until they filed a legal affidavit that they had never been Communists.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4140

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