A Film Canon

This shattering film plays like a corrective to Goodbye, Mr Chips, replacing its hero with Andrew Crocker-Harris (Michael Redgrave), whose last day of teaching gradually reveals that he has been "an utter failure of a schoolmaster", despised and pitied by students and colleagues alike, if even registered as human at all. Although the psychological and social explanation provided - a combination of a demonic wife (Jean Kent) with a peculiarly English oblivion to the facts of life, resulting in full-scale repression of every human attribute - is somewhat simplistic, and may reflect a more implicit homosexual agenda on playwright and screenwriter Terence Rattigan's part, it's more than compensated for by Redgrave's performance - and, more specifically, by his perfection of the "Crock"'s pedantic, wavering, solipsistic and, ultimately, defensive, verbosity, ensuring that he only gains the viewer's sympathy in an extremely gradual, circuitous manner, and making his few moments of capitulation or self-recognition all the more poignant, especially since they are frequently elided, whether literally (as when he receives his one gift from a student - Browning's translation of the Agamemnon - and turns his back to the camera, shaking slightly), or simply by virtue of the sheer level of his repression, which ensures that he remains distant from even the most ostensibly direct, emotional pronouncements. From this perspective, the riotous applause that greets his final apology to the school assembly - absent from the original play - is at odds with the rest of the film, as is its validation of the public school ethos that is not so much pathologised throughout the body of the narrative (although the Headmaster's refusal to give Crock a pension, on a technicality, is nicely juxtaposed with his hyperbolic, enthusiastic discussions of cricket and tea) as subordinated to the central character study - although this, in itself, might be taken as a subversion of that ethos' implicit collapse of individual and lineage, diachrony and synchrony, as evinced in the traumatic, rather than (as in Goodbye, Mr Chips) meditative quality ascribed to age.