Cinema: Old Master

“The schoolmaster who imagines he is loved and trusted by his boys is, in fact, mimicked and laughed at behind his back,” recalled George Orwell in Such, Such Were the Joys. James Hilton took the opposite view. The schoolmaster who thought himself mocked was actually loved. Orwell’s essay may have been what the public needed to know. But Hilton’s 1934 novel was what it wished to read. Goodbye, Mr. Chips rapidly passed from sentimental classic bestseller to sentimental classic movie. In the title role, Robert Donat won an Academy Award, and Mr. Chips achieved legendary status as the old master of the schoolboy soul.

Students, teachers, England and the world have altered considerably in 35 years. But Brookfield School remains a tranquil antechamber to gentlemanhood, where the master now reigns in the person of Peter O’Toole. Discarding the shy, dry Donat approach, O’Toole becomes his own man, a conflicted figure changing imperceptibly from instructor to institution, like an elm turning, cell by cell, into petrified rock. The result is one of the slyest and subtlest performances in his career.

Unhappily, he is contained in a clumsily updated block off the old Chips. It is no longer the Great War but World War II that punctuates the scholastic calendar, Chips’ missus (Petula Clark) becomes the victim not of childbirth but of a V-l rocket. Still, the boys are the same deferential crew; the school is ivied and kind, an eon removed from the kind of place Orwell considered “a tightrope over a cesspool.” The only instance of sadism, in fact, is the disastrous decision to make Goodbye, Mr. Chips a musical. As a result, Leslie Bricusse was given license to inflict ten songs. Like the pupils’ Latin lessons, the lyrics will not pass scrutiny (“He smiled. I smiled. We smiled. And the sky smiled too.”); the melodies are scarcely more tuneful than a piece of hard chalk drawn across a blackboard. Even with O’Toole’s oddly moving Sprechgesang and Clark’s perfect phrasing, the numbers never add up to a score.

In such an intimate story, all other characters are subordinate. But one actress has taken a minor part and nearly made off with the show. As Mrs. Chips’ bony crony, Sian Phillips (Mrs. O’Toole offscreen) moves like Garbo, hoots like Tallulah, and seems quite the most animated skeleton since Halloween.

In his first directorial assignment, Herbert Ross lights Clark’s songs as if she were doing a turn on This Is Tom Jones, and tends to place his camera at jarring angles. He even mounts it on the V-l, making the viewer feel like a patient of Dr. Strangslove. No matter. It is one of the graces of group art that if any one can destroy a project, so any one can save it. Mr. Chips is barely enough because Mr. O’Toole is more than enough.