Starting as a bumbling waiter to hordes of West Point Cadets on his first day off the boat, Irish immigrant Marty Maher stays to becomes a 50-yr Non-commissioned institution in this Mr. Chips Goes to West Point saga. And if you can make it past the broad blarney & comic blather of the opening reels, the film gains interest as life’s hard knocks & war’s toll darken the landscape while director John Ford gets his footing in CinemaScope. (He hated the ultra-widescreen format and largely avoided it in the future.) Maher keeps trying to leave the place, like James Stewart in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE/’46, but his personal story (even a lost child) never catches fire. (NOTRE DAME inventing football’s forward pass to beat ARMY the film’s big moment. Honor thru Failure, a typical Ford motif.) As an archetype with fabulous overtones, Tyrone Power makes for pleasant company, but he's short on technique & variety. Something supplied in spades by Donald Crisp as his authoritarian Old World father and Maureen O’Hara as the redheaded colleen he marries. They have a naturally stylized atmosphere about them, even in posture & musical line readings. Indulgent in sentiment & running time (2+ hours), but worth it for Ford’s coup de théâtre curtain-call: a visual paraphrase of Faulkner’s ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ To Ford, ‘The dead are never past. They’re not even dead.’
DOUBLE-BILL: The original Robert Donat/Greer Garson GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS/’39, holding up nicely.
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