This is a representative - and an Oscar-winner at that - from what has been described as the Greatest year in the Golden Age of film-making, 1939 so that anyone viewing it for the first time in the 21st century and cognizant of the reputation of 1939 is going to expect the very highest standards and on balance shouldn't be too disappointed. Sure, the process shots are glaringly obvious as is the Establishing shot but there's not too much wrong with the core, the human values, decency, moral certitude that make Atticus Finch and Edward Chipping brothers under the skin. It's chilling to hear Chips 'rebelling' against the lowering of educational standards almost one hundred years ago and risible that he was merely protesting at the 'new' pronunciation of Latin when today schoolchildren are lucky if they are taught to read and write by teaching staff who can just about manage one or the other themselves. There have been two outstanding Classics masters in English literature and both were translated from respectively the printed page and the stage with exceptional success, James Hilton's Mr Chips and Terence Rattigan's Andrew Crocker-Harris in The Browning Version; both were essentially colorless but only Chips benefited from marriage and what was the making of Chips was the undoing of Crocker-Harris. If Robert Donat wasn't quite the actor Michael Redgrave was he was a very worthy runner-up and if audiences today find it slightly inconceivable that a nebbish like this could win the love of ANY woman let alone a beautiful one like Greer Garson perhaps the public of fifty years ago were more in tune with real values. It's also slightly strange to note that two of the supporting players - one uncredited - would go on to appear in two more timeless classics within barely five years; Paul Henreid, slightly wooden as Staefel, the German teacher responsible for Chips meeting his future wife, went on to play Victor Laszlo in Casablanca, whilst the uncredited Cyril Raymond (one of the masters at Brookfield) went on to play Celia Johnson's husband in Noel Coward's Brief Encounter. Perhaps the gimmick of showing how constant education was in a pre-Blair England by having successive generations of Colly not only educated at Brookfield but played by the same boy is a little twee today but overall the film presses all the right buttons and is held together by a central performance to rival anything in Hollywood or Britain.
Review of Goodbye, Mr. Chips
