Cheers for Miss Bishop

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.

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 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.

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.