Goodbye, Miss Turlock

1948 was a year for strong women. Loretta Young won the Best Actress Oscar for THE FARMER'S DAUGHTER, beating out (among others) Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc. This typically sentimental "Our Passing Parade" short about an old-maid teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, played by Nana Bryant, won the Best One-Reel Movie Award.

Like all of the Passing Parade short subjects, it was written and narrated by John Nesbitt. Nesbitt would tell you what was going on, even as the performers proceeded to perform their actions. It's an old technique from silent movies, called "Animated Text" and it required good humor, a strong sense of irony and good writing, lest it turn into that bane of all narrated cartoons, "Radio With Pictures." Fortunately, it has those.

By the way, in checking the Oscar competition for 1948, I noticed that the best cartoon was TWEETIE PIE. I'm not sure how that fits into the "strong women" thought in the first paragraph.

This short can be found as an extra on the DVD for the Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams film "Fiesta".

This Oscar-winning short is from MGM's 'Passing Times' series by John Nesbitt. These films tend to look back fondly at the 'good 'ol days'--with very a idealized view of America.

In this installment, the narrator (Nesbitt) talks glowingly about life in the one-room schoolhouse. It also focuses on Miss Turlock--the teacher in this school. It's all very sentimental and very well made. Though, I must admit, also very slight and overly idealized--making the one-room schoolhouse seem like the best darn form of education ever created.

By the way, watch the spitball on the blackboard. It will appear and disappear and appear again due to some continuity problems.

Goodbye, Miss Turlock (1948)

*** (out of 4)

Oscar-winning short has an adult (narration by John Nesbitt) looking back at his childhood where he was taught by a stern teacher in a one-room school. This is a pretty good short as it does a very good job at showing how an adult can look back at his childhood with fond memories of something small yet that thing might have meant the world to them. This film is also a social commentary as we get a few punches thrown about various highways that are going up and cutting into the old country school, which allowed kids to be taught by the same person throughout their young lives. Nana Bryant, a veteran of over one-hundred films, does a nice job in her role even though she doesn't have a single line of dialogue. The film runs a short 12-minutes but there's enough kindness in the film to make it worth viewing.

This is a feel-good short about a teacher in a one-room school. I have no idea why it won an Oscar (one reel short). Maybe it was lack of competition. There is nothing really wrong with the film, but nothing terribly right with it either. I saw this on TCM during the "31 Days of Oscar" series. It will almost certainly be shown on TCM at least once in February in future years.

One of John Nesbitt's best Passing Parade short subjects this one pays tribute to the one room rural schoolhouse which after World War 2 and the development of the superhighways made it a thing of the past. I've always wondered myself what the typical school day with all the grades being taught in the same 6 hour day I had.

No dialog for the characters, but character actress Nana Bryant plays Miss Turlock who never marries, but devotes her life to putting knowledge in young minds in her small community. As another reviewer said, so many more careers would have been open to her in this day and age.

One of the best of the Passing Parades series.