“Goodbye Mr. Chips” was a 1939 MGM (British) movie, filmed in black and white and lasting 114 minutes. It was filmed in England and is based on the short novel by James Hilton. The movie tells in flashback the life story of Charles Chipping as he remembers his life at a boys public school in England. He remembers his wife, played by Greer Garson, who was far more vibrant and beautiful than a boys teacher of Latin and Greek has any right to expect, who died while still young. Mostly he remembers the boys who leave the school as young men: some to government, some to business, some to war. The movie is a touching, sometimes sad, sometimes happy movie about a man who cared to be a teacher more than anything else.
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Robert Donat is hardly your handsome leading man type. The soft-spoken English actor is best known on the eastern side of the Atlantic because he didn’t care for the Hollywood life and refused pictures made in the United States. He was an excellent actor, with a touch of whimsy to his acting. Besides “Goodbye Mr. Chips” he is best known for Hitchock’s “The Thirty-Nine Steps,” (1935)and the Hollywood production “The Citadel” (1938) for which he received a Best Actor Academy Award nomination.
