British Cinema by Charles Barr

Author:Charles Barr [Barr, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191512704
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

Goodbye Mr Chips (1939) and The Lion Has Wings (1939)

In the ‘phoney war’ period up to May 1940, before Dunkirk, before Churchill’s takeover, these were two films that policy-makers saw as especially valuable. They provide a more vivid access to that unstable time than any policy documents could do.

Premiered in the summer, Goodbye Mr Chips was widely shown in the first months of the war, in America as well as at home. For officials struggling to work out how best to use films as propaganda, it seemed an ideal model, celebrating, through the title character, ‘British life and character, showing our independence, toughness of spirit, sympathy with the underdog, etc’. The idea was widely echoed in the media.

So who is this exemplary figure? Charles Chipping is a kindly teacher at the public school (which of course means private, fee-paying; all boys, all boarders) of Brookfield in the heart of England. Appointed in 1870, he dies there in 1928, now a beloved elder statesman. The film is told in flashback, narrating his life and that of the school in relation to the social and historical events of the intervening decades.

His kindly qualities are made attractive in Robert Donat’s Oscar-winning performance, but he remains, all through, unambitious, philistine, and reactionary (Figure 12). Like the school, he simply goes on and on, into old age. Boys whom he knew as a young master are succeeded by their sons, and then their grandsons: not even their casting has to change, nor do the rituals of roll-call and Latin grammar and corporal punishment. That is the whole point.

12. Ahead of the half-century flashback in Goodbye Mr Chips: Robert Donat again, advising a junior colleague (David Tree).

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