The New Pictures

Goodbye, Mr. Chips (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is a lovingly faithful picturization of the novelette by James Hilton that gave Alexander Woollcott such a good cry five years ago. Like the book, it is sentimental in the precise sense: it exploits emotions which, reduced to propositions, most people would reject as false--e.g., that failure is somehow preferable to success. Shrewdly directed by Sam Wood, the cinementor of the Marx Brothers, Goodbye, Mr. Chips goes out for tears as unscrupulously and efficiently as those merry-andrews go out for laughs.

Mr. Chipping of Brookfield School is no great shakes as a schoolmaster, but he keeps it up for 63 years. Point of Goodbye, Mr. Chips, which begins at the end of Mr. Chips's life, is that, viewed in proper retrospect, his career is not the meaningless blank it appears to be. Believe it or not, Mr. Chips was young once, and so was Robert Donat, whose fishskin makeup in the first sequences is the most thorough- going physical transformation since the days of Lon Chancy. Believe it or not, Mr. Chips once courted a pretty girl in Vienna, and married her. And he was headmaster once, during the War, when all the able hands were at the front. Believe it or not, he did have children--as he swears on his deathbed, "thousands of them"--and schoolmastering at Brookfield was no mean way to spend a life.

Like MGM's previous productions in England, A Yank at Oxford and The Citadel, Goodbye, Mr. Chips makes economical use of local actors, notably 300 students of Repton School who acted as extras during their vacation. Besides Robert Donat, Goodbye, Mr. Chips employs only two performers who are likely to mean much in Hollywood. One is Terry Kilburn, 12-year-old son of a London bus driver, who made a hit as Tiny Tim in last season's Christmas Carol, and who functions in quadruplicate as a four-generation student of Mr. Chips. He is under long-term contract to MGM, which hopes to make him a second Freddie Bartholomew. The other is Greer Garson, who makes an impressive cinema debut as the short-lived Mrs. Chips.

Green-eyed, redheaded, Irish-born Greer Garson travelled 12,000 miles for her first cinema role. Hired by Louis B. Mayer after he saw her on the London stage, hustled to Hollywood, she was tested for a role in Dramatic School, instead spent her time in California having an appendectomy and weathering a siege of influenza. The flu proved lucky, since Dramatic School was a flop. MGM's present plans for her, barring illness, are, first, a part in Susan and God, then the lead in Myron Brinig's May Flavin.

It's a Wonderful World (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). In 1934 Columbia's swart, smart little Director Frank Capra got Claudette Colbert from Paramount and Clark Gable from MGM, and loaded them into a transcontinental bus. Result was a casual comedy called It Happened One Night, which won Academy Awards for all three of them. The picture started an imitative cycle similar to that started the same year by MGM's fast-talking, fast-moving Woodbridge Strong Van Dyke II with The Thin Man. Specialist Capra has not tried to imitate The Thin Man. It's a Wonderful World is Specialist Van Dyke's late attempt to imitate It Happened One Night. Paramount was obliging enough to supply Miss Colbert, and Mr. Van Dyke's home studio furnished James Stewart and Screenwriter Ben Hecht for the occasion. But Mr. Capra may regard It's a Wonderful World as more tribute than threat.

As Edwina Corday, a lady poet whose name rather than her verses suggests Edna St. Vincent Millay, Actress Colbert encounters nocturnal adventure at a garden party. She proceeds to flutter through a picture which is a little too civilized for farce, a little too slapdash for comedy, just misses jelling into a first rate one. Memorable characterization: Ernest Truex as a bibulous Broadway playboy known to his friends as Willie-the-Pooh.

Only Angels Have Wings (Colum-bia), as its title* ominously suggests, demonstrates the damfoolishness of monkeying with those flying machines. Never has the aviator's lot seemed dirtier than at the Barranca field in the tropics, where death is always just beyond the ailerons. And if you don't break your neck in fog that makes flying like trying to put a piano through a transom, you wind up like Kid Dabb (Thomas Mitchell), grounded and out of a job after 20 years, because middle age catches up with your eyes. Or worse, like Geoff Carter (Gary Grant), you are condemned to celibacy by your hazardous occupation and then meet Jean Arthur.

Director Howard Hawks's (Dawn Patrol, Ceiling Zero) inability to stay away from the subject is as much to blame as anything for the fact that aviation on the screen has lost much of its original zoom. But he still produces one striking reason after another why airplane pictures are exciting: an overloaded ship straining like a tired bird to climb out of a canyon; a flaming plane lighting its own way into a difficult landing; an aviator (Richard Barthelmess) killing several birds at once by dropping unwanted nitroglycerin on a flight of condors.

* Not to be confused with Men with Wings, Angels with Dirty Faces, Angel, Wings.

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