Tutta una vita

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.

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.

Elderly retired teacher Ella Bishop (Martha Scott) recalls 50 years of her teaching career. In the 1880's, young student Ella is excited after listening to a lecture and inspired to be a teacher.

This kind of light sentimental fare was probably good nostalgic entertainment for a public eager to get away from the news of the war. It spends a lot of time on her personal life, but it's a student reciting the declaration of independence that hits hardest. The personal life is a lot of melodrama. The start has some good melodrama, but that mostly peters out. The teacher student stories are the heart of this type of movie and that's fine.

Enjoyed this picture which deals with a young woman, Martha Scott,(Ella Bishop) who is bound and determined to go to college and become a teacher. Ella accomplishes her goal and is given the position of a freshman English teacher in her home town college. Edmund Quenn,(James Cocoran) "Miracle on 34th Street" who played the role as the college president and gave Ella this job at the college and grew very fond of her. Ella meets a young man and falls in love with him, however, he runs off with her sister and destroys her marriage plans and her thinking about ever getting married again. Sidney Blackmer,"Rosemary's Baby", gave a great supporting role along with Marsha Hunt. There is another romance that Ella experiences except it is with a married man and his wife will not give him a divorce, so poor Ellas has to make a big decision about which way she is going to take. William Gargan, (Sam Peters) is deeply in love with Ella and wants to marry her and stands by her when life's troubles came her way.

The sad part about this film is that Martha Scott never received an Academy Award for her great acting performance role in this picture.

The best that can be said for CHEERS FOR MISS BISHOP is MARTHA SCOTT gives a quietly understated performance as the lovelorn school marm in the title role. She's clearly the film's best asset.

The script is a mawkish thing, unabashedly sentimental in the tradition of "women's films" of the '40s, never missing an opportunity for a close-up of tearful, self-effacing, noble Miss Bishop as she is forced to discard all of the men who genuinely love her.

With barely a hint of comedy to lighten the dramatics, it wallows in artificial soap suds for the greater part of its length. WILLIAM GARGAN is pleasant as her life-long friend and companion who loves her from afar, and MARSHA HUNT, SIDNEY BLACKMER and STERLING HOLLOWAY do nicely in supporting roles.

MARY ANDERSON plays the vampish "other woman" with batting eyes and coquettish ways in what must be her most overbaked style. Her winning Scott's beau with her wily ways in the moonlight makes for a plot device hard to swallow. EDMUND GWENN lends his solid, dignified presence to the role of a school president who encourages Scott on her decision to remain a teacher at the hometown college.

Through all of the tears, Miss Scott remains as noble as Greer Garson ever was in any of her MGM long-suffering parts thanks to the advice she's always getting from others in the way of modern methods.

Summing up: A poor man's "Chips", overly sentimental story of an old maid schoolteacher with too much syrup in the script--too heavy on unending sentiment.

Trivia note: For a saga that covers some 60 years in the life of a schoolmarm, the make-up artists opted for unconvincing white wigs with unlined faces.

As Miss Bishop, Martha Scott remains just as trim in old age as she was as a young woman instead of undergoing a more realistic aging, as did Olivia de Havilland for her character in TO EACH HIS OWN.