Goodbye, Miss Turlock

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.

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.

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.

My mother taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Iowa, in the 1940s. Several years ago we drove to the spot where the schoolhouse was, to find it had been torn down.

Each morning she had to arrive early to the freezing building to light a coal stove for the children who would arrive later.

These schoolhouses were the centers of their communities.

I remember this film when I saw it in the 1950s, as a short accompanying the major feature. It stuck with me, not knowing at the time that my mother taught at one. And so after several google searches I found it, 60 years later, on YouTube.

It is sentimental, of course, but nothing wrong with that. And it contains the stereotype of the "old maid" schoolteacher. My mother wasn't an old maid, as the fact of my existence proves. There were few jobs that women could have all of their lives back then other than teaching school.

We have decided to show this to our grandchildren, to give them an idea of something that their great grandmother did. We think it will mean something to them.

Miss Turlock is presented as compassionate and wise. And a good teacher. It was a life to be proud of.

A sweet little film depicting a part of rural life in the first half of the Twentieth Century.