Herbert Ross (1969)

In both James Hilton’s 1934 novella Goodbye, Mr Chips and the first, famous Hollywood film adaptation five years later, the title character’s marriage is tragically brief.  Chipping, a shy and solitary classics master at Brookfield, a (fictional) public school for boys, is brought out of his shell by a young woman he meets while on holiday.  After she dies in childbirth, Chipping never remarries but love has transformed him.  He teaches at Brookfield for many more years but is no longer the dry-as-dust taskmaster he once was.  In retirement, he continues to live close to the school.  On his deathbed, he hears former colleagues talking about him.  He replies, ‘I thought you said it was a pity, a pity I never had any children.  But you’re wrong.  I have!  Thousands of ’em, thousands of ’em … and all … boys.’

This film musical version of Goodbye, Mr Chips retains that ‘all boys’ line but Terence Rattigan’s screenplay recasts Hilton’s story in several ways.  Arthur Chipping (Peter O’Toole) first sees his future wife Katherine Bridges (Petula Clark) in a London theatre, where she’s performing on stage – she’s a music hall soubrette.  (They do, by an incredible coincidence, next meet on holiday, while each is wandering round the ruins of Pompeii.)  Katherine’s theatrical background and tendencies make it hard for her to adjust to life as a schoolmaster’s wife but she does so in time, and becomes a popular member of the Brookfield community, especially among the boys.  The Chippings’ marriage is childless but lasts a good few years.  In the advanced timeframe of the story, which begins in the 1920s and ends in the 1960s, Katherine dies in a World War II air raid – on the same day that her husband, after being passed over previously by the school governors, learns, too late to tell his wife, that he’s to become headmaster.  The narrative takes the widowed Chips into retirement and old age but he’s still going pretty strong, taking his walk in a country lane near Brookfield, when the closing credits roll.

According to Wikipedia, a draft musical adaptation of Goodbye, Mr Chips had been ‘on file in the MGM script department since 1951’ but things didn’t progress until the mid-1960s.  From that point on, all the key personnel changed at least once before shooting got underway in 1968.  After first Vincente Minnelli then Gower Champion had left the project, it became the debut feature of Herbert Ross, who’d directed a musical for television but hitherto worked solely as a choreographer in cinema.  Leslie Bricusse’s song score replaced one written by Andre and Dory Previn.  The first names in the frame to play the leads were Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews.  Katherine turned into Samantha Eggar, Lee Remick and finally Petula Clark.  As Chips, Richard Burton, who’d followed on from Harrison, parted company with the production when Clark was cast, dismissing her as ‘a pop singer’.  Peter O’Toole stepped in.

Rookie Herbert Ross was hardly in a position to stamp his personality on an expensive MGM production, and didn’t.  The film has the usual inflated feel of the Hollywood musical in decline:  Ross is keen, for example, on grandiose overhead shots to describe scenes that don’t justify them.  The two ensemble numbers with Petula Clark at their centre – one in the London theatre, the other on the school hall stage with some of the Brookfield boys – work well enough.  But Bricusse’s score, with the exception of Katherine’s sweetly melancholy solo ‘You and I’, is mediocre – a quality emphasised rather than concealed by the soaring orchestration sometimes in evidence.  The modest songs are more effective when Peter O’Toole is speak-singing them.  They become part of his marvellous portrait of Chips.

O’Toole was thirty-six when he made the film.  For someone like me, coming to it for the first time half a century on, there’s a risk of underestimating the scale of his achievement in convincingly playing a character from his mid-thirties through to old age.  Seeing him age so naturally here can’t have the impact it would have had in 1969 simply because I saw O’Toole actually age as a screen actor, from Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to Dean Spanley (2008).   The hair and make-up (by George Blackler, Ivy Emmerton and Bill Lodge) are good – only on the geriatric Chips does it look like aging make-up – but it’s the combination of O’Toole’s technical skill and imaginative sympathy that’s at the heart of his characterisation and which creates its magic.  His mastery of the man’s subtly changing speech and movement across the decades is also a reflection of how deeply he inhabits Chips.

As might be expected, O’Toole is as funny as he is affecting – for example, in showing sloppy use of the English language to be almost physically painful to Chips.  In the early stages of the romance with Katherine, he’s beautifully diffident:  he stands, inclined (in both senses) to move nearer to her but uncertain if he should.  His face shows tiny frown lines of anxious hesitancy.  The tasteful invention of his line readings is a wonder.  At two points of the story, Chips races out of the school grounds in pursuit of Katherine, being borne away first on a bus, then in a car.  Both travel faster than Chips’s legs can carry him but the literally dashing figure of O’Toole, so tall and slender he might be a cartoon, is something to behold.  In terms of expressive movement, these sprints are as good as many movie musical dance sequences.  The emotion in O’Toole’s eyes, behind spectacles, when he absorbs the news of Katherine’s death in the middle of a lesson and, later, when Chips conducts his final assembly, makes these moments extraordinarily moving.

As both singer and actress, Petula Clark is competent but she’s too bland and wholesome for the woman she’s meant to be.  Katherine doesn’t have to be coarse but does need to convey why the Brookfield establishment at first sees her as highly unsuitable.  It’s hard to see what a snob or stick-in-the-mud would object to in the charming, ladylike Petula Clark.  In the 1939 film, the young woman who brings Robert Donat’s Chips to emotional life is differently outrageous – she’s a suffragette (played by Greer Garson).  Turning Katherine into a soubrette is best justified by Siân Phillips’s bravura comic turn as Ursula Mossbank, the high-camp cynosure of Katherine’s circle of bohemian friends.  Superbly dressed (by Julie Harris), Phillips delivers her lines not just with high-speed panache but also, thanks to her vocal range and control, without apparent effort – or seeming to draw breath.  The strong supporting cast also includes Michael Redgrave, as the headmaster of Brookfield; Alison Leggatt, as his formidably disapproving wife; Michael Bryant, as a German teacher on the staff; George Baker, as a philandering ‘philanthropist’ and all-round nasty piece of work; and Michael Culver, as the friend who introduces Chips to Katherine.

It would be interesting to know how much changes to the original were Terence Rattigan’s own idea and how much imposed on him as supposedly necessary ingredients of a Hollywood musical-isation of the source material.  Rattigan had already, twenty years before in The Browning Version, got under the skin and revealed the soul of a long-serving public school classics master whose pupils thought him severe and humourless.  (Michael Redgrave’s presence in Goodbye, Mr Chips is a continuing reminder of that.)  Even though the plotting is obvious and sometimes clumsy, Rattigan’s dialogue, especially for Chips, is very good.  It often seems to reflect a penetrating insight into the main relationships in the story.   Herbert Ross’s direction tends to telegraph the dramatic twists and crises but O’Toole keeps rescuing the situation.

Sally and I saw Goodbye, Mr Chips as part of BFI’s musical season.  The film was preceded by an interview with Siân Phillips (who was married to Peter O’Toole at the time it was made).  Now eighty-six, she still looks and sounds wonderful[1].  It was a special bonus for Sally when Phillips, asked by the interviewer to name her all-time favourite musical, chose Pal Joey because it was the start of her own career in stage musicals.  This was a 1980 production that Sally saw at the Half Moon Theatre (before it transferred to the West End), loved and has never forgotten.  (Denis Lawson was Joey.)  BFI presented this show as a special ‘50^th anniversary screening’ of Goodbye, Mr Chips.  Since it’s not regarded as a film musical classic, that sounded a bit OTT.  But Peter O’Toole’s great performance is worth celebrating.

20 October 2019

[1] Phillips shared the NFT3 stage with an amiable man, now in his sixties, who played one of the Brookfield schoolboys.  I’m afraid I didn’t take a note of his name and can’t track it down on the IMDb cast list.