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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 33, No. 5 22 April 1970

Goodbye Mr Chips

Goodbye Mr Chips.

Still from Goodbye Mr. Chips

There is a common tendency among film-makers, especially those from the larger studios, to transform popular films and novels into musicals. Hullo Dolly and Oliver are just two examples. This tendency is possibly a reflection of a commercial caution on their part since the musical is traditionally a safe economic venture; while the presence of a big-name writer in the credits should cement the probability that the resulting production will be a money-winner. MGM have done it again, this time with James Hilton's novel Goodbye Mr Chips. Unfortunately, in the process, they have done the original considerable damage. The story of Mr Chips has a great deal of charm but most of it has been lost in the spectacular, wide-screen, camera-panning cinerama version that Director Herbert Ross has turned out.

Goodbye Mr Chips traverses the entire life of Mr Chiping, a pedantic and reserved schoolmaster in an English public school. Throughout the film, Chips remains a caricature but Peter O'Toole succeeds in adding life if not depth to the role. Chips meets and later marries an actress from the stage, played by Petula Clark. Miss Clark hates the stage, just like, as she says in the best cliche in the film, "a captain hating the sea". So Pet becomes Mrs Chips who, despite her extroverted temperament, relishes the rustic life of an English public school. In some very appealing sequences, she undermines the traditional austerity of the school with her stageshow flamboyancy. Mr and Mrs Chips live happily for two decades until her death during the war. We see Mr Chips living on to old age with only his memories. This last part of the film evokes glimmerings of the transience of life, but the effect is not strong, owing partly to the inadequacies of Terrence Rattigan's screenplay and partly to the sheer length of the film.

There are two main faults with this film. The first is Leslie Bricusse's musical score. Only one of the songs is memorable; the rest are not only weak but distracting. The second fault is the photography. At times during the film, director Ross' camera seems to be almost uncontrolled. This is especially so during the scene in Naples in which Chips meets his future wife. Here the camera movement is quite mindless. The camera zooms, pans and swings continually, all to no effect. One good piece of photography, however, must be mentioned. Mrs Chips is killed in a flying bomb attack, and the camera is placed in front of the bomb. We see it dip, and fall with the camera freezing on the point of impact. The effect is quite chilling.

Mr Ross has committed still further faults. He has failed to coach his actors into giving convincing character portrayals. He seems instead to have relied on isolated effects of individual lines and scense: there is little cohesion. Chips at the beginning of the film and Chips half way through the film are two very different personalities; a change in character not justified by changes in circumstances. Petula Clark's performance is still worse. Whereas Peter O'Toole's acting has sporadic high points, Petula Clark fails totally to bring any intellectual depth to her role and rests satisfied with the mere presentation of superficial feelings.

The director has also failed in his attempt to show time passing. His effort to depict the entire life of Chips lacks a sense of motion, and rests on three or four unrelated chapters in his life.

For the most part, Goodbye Mr Chips has pretensions which do not come off. The producers opted for a large scale production-special musical score, Cinerama, 70 millimeters, long running time and the rest of it. The story of Mr Chips would, in my opinion have made an excellent low budget, short, intimate movie. In adopting epic techniques, the beauty of the story somehow got lost.