Dueña de su destino

I am a teacher, so it might seem a bit surprising that I felt rather indifferent to this film about an English professor. While Martha Scott is competent in the lead role, the film offers nothing particularly new or compelling--especially since the film seems an awful lot like a mediocre re-working of GOODBYE MR. CHIPS. However, unlike CHIPS, this film offers no particularly interesting insights into Miss Bishop and other than teaching for a very long time, I can't think of how this character merits a film. Sure, she sacrifices her love life for teaching, there really is no reason for this to have happened--other than it was a plot device and fit the formula of the film. Please understand, I am not saying the film is bad or not worth seeing--its just that CHIPS and THE CORN IS GREEN and many other films cover the same type material in a much better and more interesting way.

This was a kind of a female "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" with Martha Scott in the lead. Unlike "Chips," however, this one centered more around the lead's relationships with the opposite sex than it did her teaching career.

The film starts off well with some wonderful old-fashioned goodness that one can only find in the movies during the 1930s or 1940s. Edmund Gwenn, who plays the president of the college featured in the film, begins a meeting with a prayer! Can you see that in today's films?

Unfortunately, Scott's morals deteriorate as she has a relationship with a married man. Later, her granddaughter thinks of doing the same. Nowhere in the film does it hint that perhaps that is the wrong thing to do! The only comment was that if you have kids, it would cause a scandal inferring that otherwise, hey, go for it! No wonder the Liberal critics love this movie.

If you like women's films, you probably will like this as romance is the main theme. To me, the beginning and the sentimental ending were nice but the bulk of the story.....well, better for someone who prefers "soaps."

Most of Cheers for Miss Bishop is told in flashback as Martha Scott reminisces with old friend William Gargan about her fifty years as a professor of English at Midwestern University. In fact the whole film is held together by Martha Scott's powerful performance in the title role.

Scott tells of her life beginning with her accepting a position at a small college after graduating from same as an English teacher. She's one of those rare people who's life and job become bound as one and finds she has no use for the other aspects of life like home and family. Even Robert Donat's Mr. Chips married Greer Garson albeit ever so briefly.

Not that she didn't have chances to marry, but her career and her students came first.

Martha Scott gets good support from a nice ensemble of players that also include Edmund Gwenn and John Hamilton as her college presidents, Dorothy Peterson as her mother, and Mary Anderson as her great niece.

Particularly impressive to me was Rosemary DeCamp as a young Scandinavian immigrant student who Scott recognizes intuitively as being an incipient genius with a photographic memory. When she's accused of cheating Scott saves her from expulsion by having her recite the Declaration of Independence from memory. It's a very powerful screen debut for Rosemary DeCamp.

Still the film is Martha Scott's show and a good show it is too.

I just saw this movie for the first time today. Martha Scott did a superb job playing a mid-western teacher who put her career and love for people above her own personal happiness. I really enjoyed this sentimental piece. The supporting cast was excellent too.

The movie follows the course of an unmarried teacher's life and loves over the period of her lengthy career.

The narrative has to cover a fifty-year span in 90-minutes, which is a challenge even for the best screenplays. This one, however, cobbles together both people and events in a loose way that unfortunately gets little beyond surfaces. Other reviewers are correct—there is very little character development. Instead, people more or less drift in and out of the teacher's life without time to develop. As a result, it's hard to engage with characters, and even with Scott's Miss Bishop since the teacher's role is underplayed. (An exception, as others note, is Minna whose difficulty is very vividly done.) Still, Miss Bishop's recessive manner perhaps conveys repressed emotion, not improbable behavior for a spinster of that time. If some such were intended, it would be an interesting angle, but I don't see much thematic evidence of that. All in all, Miss Bishop comes across more like an on-looker to her own life rather than a participant.

Nonetheless, the film deals, at least tangentially, with a difficult topic for the period. That is, can an unmarried professional woman have a rewarding life without being a wife and a mother. To the film's credit, it appears to say yes, as the final tribute scene affirms. Still, the film does fudge by making the spinster (Scott) attractive and with a life-long suitor (Gargan) whom she inexplicably keeps on a tether. So, remaining unmarried stands as her choice rather than an outside imposition. The film would have been more memorable, I think, had production made Miss Bishop more plain, and dealt with the problems of a plain, unmarried woman given the mores of passing generations. But dealing honestly with plain women was never a Hollywood or box-office favorite.

Anyway, the movie's mainly a sanitized concoction for viewers who like dipping into old style Hollywood soaps. The production's not without its moments, but the overall effect is pretty loose and sticky.