Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)

Goodbye, Mr. Chips is a British romantic film drama first released in 1939, directed by Sam Wood.  The film stars Robert Donat, Greer Garson, Terry Kilburn, John Mills and Paul Henreid.  It has also been released under the title: Goodbye Mr. Chips!.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


England, 1933.  Although officially retired, Mr Chipping still maintains a visible presence at Brookfield School For Boys, a private school to which he has devoted 63 years of his adult life.  One evening, sitting comfortably beside the fire in his room, he casts his mind back to the day he first arrived at the school, when he was a gauche 22-year-old eager to take up his post as Latin teacher.   In those early days, he lacked confidence and authority and so his boys treated him as an object of ridicule.   Twenty years later, a shy middle-aged man, Mr Chipping feels settled in his job and expects to be promoted to housemaster.  When he fails to win the coveted promotion, Chipping agrees to accompany his colleague Max Staefel, the German teacher, on a walking tour in Austria.  It is here, whilst mountain climbing, that Chipping meets Kathy Ellis, an attractive young woman on a cycling holiday.  When he runs into Kathy a second time in Vienna, Chipping realises that he is in love and, with Max’s connivance, the couple are soon married.   On Chipping’s return to Brookfield with his new bride, colleagues and pupils alike are astounded by the news of his marriage, but all are immediately won over by the amiable Mrs Chipping.  A short while later, Chipping gets his long-awaited promotion and his wife is certain that it will not be long before he is the school’s headmaster.   Mr Chipping could not be happier; Fate has given him everything he could ask for.  Then tragedy strikes...

The first, and by far the best, adaptation of James Hilton’s well-known novella Goodbye, Mr. Chips (which the author reputedly wrote in four days to meet a magazine deadline) provided Robert Donat with his most memorable screen role and effectively launched the Hollywood careers of both Greer Garson and Paul Henreid.  In the hands of an American film director, Hilton’s highly sentimentalised account of a schoolmaster’s life could so easily have ended up as a painfully mawkish piece of low grade melodrama, but Sam Wood’s deft direction and Donat’s measured performance somehow prevent this from happening.  The result is a masterfully constructed, genuinely moving character study that has doubtless done more to encourage young people to enter the teaching profession than any number of promotional videos or government incentives.

When it was first released in 1939, just a few months before the outbreak of WWII, Goodbye, Mr. Chips proved to be an immensely popular film on both sides of the Atlantic and, in an average year it would undoubtedly have won a bevy of Oscars.  As it turned out, 1939 was far from an average year – in fact many now consider this to be Hollywood’s creative high point.  Although it was nominated for seven Academy Awards, the film won just one – the Best Actor award, which went (deservedly) to Robert Donat.  This was in itself an achievement, since the other nominees for the award included James Stewart, Laurence Olivier and Clark Gable, for their stand-out performances in Mr Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights and Gone With the Wind respectively.

Perhaps the most appealing aspect of Goodbye, Mr. Chips is that it strikes an appropriate balance between comedy and tragedy and consequently retains a sense of reality throughout, despite some rather obvious plot contrivances.  Donat’s portrayal of Chipping may veer towards the predictable doddering old man in the schoolteacher’s later years but he never ceases to be a believable character, such is the quality of the screenwriting and direction, to say nothing of Donat’s performance. 

The sequences with Greer Garson are particularly memorable, and are made all the more poignant by the fact that we can guess the fate of her character even before the Blue Danube leitmotif enters the frame and blasts its first warning for us to get the Kleenex handy.  The later scenes in which Chipping tries to cope with the loss of of his former pupils and colleagues during WWI are handled less subtly but are still exquisitely moving.  Unlike its lacklustre 1969 remake (a soulless musical oddity with Peter O’Toole in the lead role), this version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips is a pure delight, a timeless classic that is both captivating and genuinely heartrending.

© filmsdefrance.com 2010

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