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Hello goodbye
The new Mr. Chips is no Robert Donat or Peter O’Toole
BY STEVE VINEBERG

James Hilton wrote Goodbye, Mr. Chips over four days for the Christmas 1933 issue of British Weekly and then sold it to the Atlantic Monthly; within six months, it was published in book form. A thin, sentimental novella, it nonetheless contains an irresistible dramatic idea that the popular 1939 movie, directed by Sam Wood, built shrewdly upon. Chipping, nicknamed Chips, is a classics master at a boys’ school, Brookfield, beginning in 1870. Unsure of himself at first, he tends toward a dour rigidity that permits him to keep his students under control, but when in middle age he falls in love with a young suffragette named Katherine, she humanizes him. Although she dies young, in childbirth, her legacy — a preference for humor and compassion with his pupils over impatience and strict discipline — turns him into the school’s most beloved teacher. He lives to a ripe old age, intimately linked to his old students long after they’ve left Brookfield and to the current crop long after he’s stopped teaching. The movie, gracefully produced and showcasing a marvelous, Dickensian performance by Robert Donat in the title role, is a tribute to the moral values of a liberal education — like The Corn Is Green and Sounder. It was remade in 1969 as a musical, updated about half a century; and despite the pallid Leslie Bricusse songs and the unfortunate pictorial montages behind them, this one too is worth seeing — mainly for the performances of Peter O’Toole as Chips (it’s one of his two or three finest) and Petula Clark as his bride, who’s been rewritten as a musical-theater star who dies entertaining the troops during the Second World War.

The latest Goodbye Mr. Chips, imported from England for Masterpiece Theatre, has lost its comma, and a great deal more besides. It’s the first version devoid of charm. The writer, Frank Delaney, has turned Chips (Martin Clunes) into a reformer who stands simultaneously for the old-fashioned Victorian gentlemanly virtues and against the old-fashioned British vices, like the class system, corporal punishment, and jingoism. He’s such an instinctive humanist that Kathie scarcely has to bring him out. This dramatization flogs all the points that the 1939 film — like Hilton’s novella — makes quietly.

To pick one example: when his old friend Max Staefel, the German teacher, returns to his homeland and dies in the First World War, Chips, now headmaster, eulogizes him in an assembly alongside the names of those alumni who perished fighting for England. It’s a touching moment, especially in the first film, where Staefel (who plays a significant role in Chips’s courtship of Kathie) is enacted with great sweetness by Paul Henreid. In the new version, Delaney and the director, Stuart Orme, haul out all the old clichés about prejudice against the enemy — the boys mistreat Staefel, the headmaster sacks him, and so on. And in an embarrassing addendum, a German plane crashes on school grounds and Chips rushes out to cradle the wounded pilot in his arms and lead him in prayer. The original point of the German-bomber scene Hilton invented — Chips’s ability to make the classics relevant to the boys with the sounds of warfare over their heads — is eclipsed by the filmmakers’ insistence on making him the sort of implausible hero who trumpets the kind of lessons contemporary parents might like their children to learn. The irony is that this Chips, who never shuts up about injustice, is far less effective than any previous incarnation.

Clunes appears to have been cast for his sensitive looks; there’s close-up after close-up of him looking stricken. But the filmmakers forget to dramatize the shift in the boys’ feelings toward him or to show how they grow to love his wife (played as an elfin version of Shaw’s New Woman by Victoria Hamilton, who has no chemistry with Clunes). So the scene where, in the midst of playing an April Fool’s joke on him, they hear of Kathie’s death has no emotional resonance. If you’ve seen the Wood film, you probably remember the episode; if you’ve seen the musical, where O’Toole’s distractedness as he opens the blank letters the boys have piled up on his desk is devastating, you’re not likely to have forgotten it. Here it makes no impression. Neither does anything else.


Issue Date: October 17 - 23, 2003
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