...a film that has stood the test of time remarkably well and should continue to provide pleasure for as long as people value characterization and heart above plot contrivances and technical effects.
Tools:
Recommend review to a friend »
Everything begins somewhere. Sidney Poitier's "To Sir, With Love"; Robin Williams's "Dead Poets Society"; Kevin Kline's "The Emperor's Club"; Peter O'Toole's 1969 musical version of "Chips"; the various TV interpretations of James Hilton's novel. They and a hundred more like them all got their start with Robert Donat's Academy Award-winning performance in Sam Wood's 1939 production of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips." As fine as some of some its successors are, none of them equals the original.
Hilton's Charles Edward Chipping, known affectionately to friends and pupils as "Chips," is everyone's idealized teacher. He's a master at Brookfield, a private boys' boarding school in the heart of England. Starting his career in 1870, Chips is kind, gentle, shy, soft-spoken, caring, fair, but firm, and he remains that way his entire career. He wins the respect of his students through his patience and good humor. He is the teacher we'd all like to have, and the teacher we'd all like to be. In the hands of actor Robert Donat, Chips is quietly convincing as the actor ages through the better part of a lifetime, his character struggling through good times and bad, happy times and sad. Although in terms of an Oscar win I've never agreed that Donat should have beaten Clark Gable in "Gone With the Wind," there is no doubting that Donat's performance is the single most important contribution to the film.
The story is told in flashback as an aged Chips looks back on his career, from the time he first enters Brookfield as a totally inexperienced teacher of Latin. The boys needle him no end, taking every advantage of the new guy in school, their hijinks finally getting so out of control the Headmaster has to come in to establish order. Chips is on the verge of quitting before he even gets started. But persevere he does, and he continues at Brookfield for the next sixty-odd years, becoming as much an institution at the school as the school itself.
Still, there is something missing from his life. In middle age, while traveling one summer in the Alps with his good friend, German master Max Staefel (Paul Henreid, billed here as Paul von Hernreid), Chips meets a beautiful young woman, Katherine Ellis (Greer Garson), and falls in love for only the second time in his life. As he explains, the first time was when he was fourteen and it hardly counted. Chips is amazingly old-fashioned and reserved, but their friendship develops into romance and then marriage, the best thing that ever happens to the man beyond his becoming a teacher. His demeanor and even his appearance change as a result of his love for Kathy. She gives him the nickname "Chips" and helps to bring him out of his self-imposed seclusion. But tragedy ensues as Kathy and their baby die in childbirth, and Chips remains unwed for the rest of his life and the rest of the movie.
And so, the years pass. The Boer War. The First World War. The senseless loss of so many young lives that Chips has nurtured and moulded snuffed out in the instant of a shot.
It's true that because of his reticence, Chips seems to come by things, as the Wife-O-Meter observed, almost by default; but this is not to suggest that he is without willpower or self-assurance. As he watches times change and old traditions die, he steadfastly clings to the methods and values he holds most dear. "Give a boy a sense of humor and sense of proportion," he tells the newest Headmaster, "and he'll stand to do anything." When the new Head asks Chips to retire, thinking him hopelessly passé and out-of-touch, Chips refuses, much to the delight of his friends and students.
Average user rating (1-5):
Not yet rated.
Not yet rated.
[release]11591[/release]