As news spread around the country that Vivien Leigh had won Best Actress honors for Gone with the Wind, the Chicago Sunday Tribune pointed out, "Greer Garson might have won an Oscar except for an error: she was nominated in the star performance division, but she was only a featured player.  She might have won in the featured division".

Goodbye, Mr. Chips premiered at the Astor Theater on Broadway in New York on May 15, 1939.  In his radio address, Alexander Woollcott proclaimed, "In a year in which the great nations of the world seem to be choosing partners for a dance of death this cavalcade of English youth becomes suddenly an almost unbearable reminder of something which in a mad and greedy world may be allowed to perish from the Earth.  I am here only to testify that in my own experience, the most moving of all motion pictures is the one called Goodbye, Mr. Chips.  "It is not necessary to agree with Alexander Wollcott that this is the best motion picture ever made, to be certain that it is a screen masterpiece", remarked the New York Herald-Tribune.  "Greer Garson, as the woman who marries Mr. Chips in spite of himself, conspires with him to give a performance of enormous sincerity which makes her relatively brief appearance in the film electric and haunting."

MRS WICKETT:  You sit down by the fire.  What you want is a nice cup of hot tea.

MR CHIPS:  Uh, I'll wait a bit.  Some of the boys might drop in.

MRS WICKETT:  Well, I have to pop out for a minute.  Everything's ready for your tea.

MR CHIPS:  And a cake, eh?

[MR CHIPS SPEAKS HERE OF A CAKE WHICH SITS ON THE ELEVATED STAND TOWARD THE RIGHT ON THE TABLE, UNDER THE CERAMIC COVER WHICH CAN BE LIFTED BY GRASPING THE KNOB AT THE TOP.  WHEN MRS WICKETT SAYS, "THERE'S THE CAKE", SHE LIFTS OFF THIS COVER TO REVEAL AN ICED CAKE WITH WALNUT HALVES EMBEDDED INTO ITS TOP, AND AS YET UNCUT.  HER USE OF THE WORD "GORGE" WILL PROVE TO BE PROPHETIC.

MRS WICKETT:  Ah, yes, there's a cake.  I wonder how many of them those boys have eaten since you first came to lodge here.  Letting them gorge you out of house and home.  Last term, 26 iced cakes, 200 rock cakes, 156 Bath buns ...

[WE NEVER LEARN HOW MUCH LONGER MRS WICKETT INTENDED HER ITEMIZATION TO CONTINUE, AS CHIPS CUTS HER OFF.]

MR CHIPS:  Enough of your loathsome statistics, woman.  Go about your business.  Go!

The boy knocking on the door is new-student Colley, the fourth in four successive generations of Colleys to have attended Brookfield since Chips arrived.  Colley has been put up to knocking on Chips' door by senior students as a prank, presumably to annoy Chips.  To the surprise of the pranksters, Chips is not annoyed, but rather invites Colley in, and proceeds to treat him as the evening's welcome guest, or perhaps it might be more accurate to say, proceeds to treat him as the evening's welcome victim.

Colley, shown fetching the tea kettle from the fireplace, can be seen to already tend more to chubby than to wiry.

LEFT BELOW:  Chips having just made his first cut on the far side of the iced cake, where it is not presently visible to the camera, now rests his knife on the cake at a position counterclockwise to that first cut, poised to create for Colley a wedge of normal size.

RIGHT BELOW:  But having taken a look at Colley sitting to his right, and perhaps prompted by sympathy or affection for Colley actuated by remembrance of Colley's forebears, Chips decides to give him a more generous piece, and so repositions his knife still farther counterclockwise, so as to capture within Colley's wedge of cake an additional column of three walnut-halves.

LEFT BELOW:  Even before Colley has had a chance to attack his super-sized slab of iced cake, shown perched precariously on his lap, Chips says "Try one of those sponge cakes".  The tops of the muffin-shaped sponge cakes can be seen at the bottom of the screen, just right of center.

RIGHT BELOW:  The camera immediately begins tilting downward toward the sponge cakes at which Colley has turned to look — perhaps seven can be counted in this improved view, but whether all the sponge cakes in the bottom layer are visible may be doubted.  We might be content to retain the estimate of nine that had been entertained above.

At the same time, the upcoming scene, consisting of a close-up of the now-empty plate on which the sponge cakes had been sitting, begins to fade-in, conveying that considerable time has passed during which Colley has managed to devour all the sponge cakes, all nine of them if our estimate is correct, and presumably his slice of iced cake as well.

LEFT BELOW: Chips asks Colley-IV, whom he has just met and knows nothing about, to fetch a kettle of boiling water sitting above a fire, and which has been seen to have flames licking up along its sides.

RIGHT BELOW: Colley turns out to be experienced enough to grab the handle with a cloth that he found sitting nearby, but the cloth is so small that it is barely visible in this still.  And the spout is aimed right at him!  And reaching in from that angle places his ventral wrist right up against the hook on which the kettle hangs, and that hook will be burning hot, hotter than the kettle because the kettle temperature will not go much above the boiling point of the water that it contains, whereas the hook does not share that moderating influence because it is not in contact with water.  Also not conducive to safety is that the action requires crouching and reaching.  If Colley underestimates the weight of kettle plus water, and if he tries to lift the kettle using only his fingertips so as to avoid his hand extending beyond the insulating pad and touching the kettle handle, and using his fingertips also so as to avoid letting his wrist touch the hook, then he is liable to lose his grip and drop the kettle.

Chips' first 23 years of teaching at Brookfield were a disaster.  He was widely disliked, and even hated, for reasons that will be examined further below.  Everything turned around for him, however, when on a hiking holiday in Austria he met Katherine, 25 years of age to his 48 would be my guess.  Nevertheless, the story runs that the two fell in love and married.  When Chips arrives back at Brookfield with his girl-wife, she immediately proceeds to sweep staff and students off their feet with the same vivacity that she had swept Chips off his feet.

The still on the right shows Katherine's first encounter with some of the Brookfield boys, whom she spontaneously invites to a regular Sunday tea.  The boys are excited by her arrival, and newly-respectful of Chips for being able to land such an impressive wife.

At the first such tea are nine boys seated at a round table, but who are not visible immediately, as the camera starts zoomed in on a muffin (as Katherine calls it) that has jam smeared across its top.  Or, maybe that's not jam — maybe the muffin has gotten burned in the oven.  No matter.  Katherine is holding the pan with this jammed or burned muffin up to the face of student Bullock, the chubbiest of all the boys at Brookfield.  However, Bullock has already eaten his fill, and now looks down at this muffin with what might be nausea, and says he doesn't want it, but Katherine won't take no for an answer — she positively has got to get rid of this muffin, and so somebody is going to have to eat it, and she has chosen poor, nauseated Bullock.

One might wonder precisely what "just one more muffin" might mean.  Exactly how many muffins has Bullock already eaten?  If Katherine had invited him to have "a second muffin", we would know, but "just one more muffin" implies more than that, but how much more the movie viewer is not told.

But Katherine is unrelenting.  Looming over Bullock, pushing the muffin into his face, she increases the pressure on him by means of a joke, which sets the students to laughing, upon which Bullock's resistance collapses, as is shown in the left still below.

The students break out in uproarious laughter, upon which Bullock takes the proffered muffin out of the pan with his fingers, himself laughing now, and bites into it.  If Bullock ends up vomiting on Katherine's tablecloth, she will have no one to blame but herself.

No one takes the trouble to point out that the advice Katherine has given Bullock is the opposite of the truth.  The truth is that it is only by eating less that Bullock will have any chance of attracting "a handsome wife".  The truth is that Katherine is putting Bullock on the road to obesity, from which the probability of winning "a handsome wife" is low.

And after her victory over Bullock's best interests, Katherine is not satisfied to retire from the field of battle to savor her triumph, she quickly lights into Martin for hanging back from joining the obesity brigade, but Martin is an athlete, and his excuse gets him off the hook, especially as that excuse is reinforced by Chips, which is what is happening in the right-hand still below.

The scene above raises related issues.  If Chips teaches a class of around 36, and if he is shown above hosting only 9, then where are the other 27?  Is the price of having a gay time with 9 that the remaining 27 feel left out?  Or does a different group of 9 come on successive Sundays, so that any given boy comes only once a month?  And is it to be expected that boys throughout the school will fault teachers who don't have effervescent wives who host pig-outs?

LEFT BELOW:  Another instance of Katherine promoting inadvisable eating.  Katherine starts by recommending that on his dormitory inspection following the lights-out bell, Chips should cough before opening the door to Room 11, so that the boys will have time to hide the food package that one of them has just received from home.  However, Chips does not cough when he reaches Room 11, and when he throws open the door, the scene that greets him is the one on the left below, which is to say not the proper scene of boys in their beds asleep, or about to fall asleep, but the improper scene of boys feasting.

RIGHT BELOW:  Even when the subject of conversation is the war — this is long after Katherine's death — Chips teaches his students to follow the Katherine doctrine to turn everything into a joke and keeping on noshing.

THREE TRAVESTIES OF JUSTICE AT BROOKFIELD SCHOOL

(1)  Headmaster Dr Wetherby Metes Out Collective Punishment for the Opening-Day Attack

Chips first class turns into a melee which is only suppressed by headmaster Dr Wetherby walking in, and announcing that he will cane the entire class on the following day.  In other words, the punishment that he chooses to administer is not individual, it is collective.  However, a review of the details of the melee will serve to reveal why collective punishment is unjust in this particular instance, and also why it has been excluded from modern justice systems.

The melee begins just as soon as Chips walks into class for the first time — his mortarboard hat is knocked off by a wire stretched across his path at hat level.  But in the class of some thirty to forty boys, how many might have actually participated in the placing of that wire?  Perhaps only one, perhaps two, it would seem three at most.  Following that, the boys kick the hat across the floor, on the pretext of trying to pick it up while inadvertently kicking it beyond reach.  But to speak of "the boys" kicking the hat is to speak inaccurately — in fact, only one boy can be seen doing so in the still on the right below, and the total number involved in the entire kicking sequence is small.

The hat is next tossed about in the air with maybe five boys reaching for it, though the number who actually get it in their grasp is smaller.  Colley standing on the dais ends up with the hat, and Chips' attempts to retrieve it are deliberately blocked by a phalanx of perhaps five boys.

Colley alone then pretends to be trying to get the hat back into shape by whacking it across his knee, and then pretends to be cleaning it by whacking it with the blackboard-erasing rag, thereby both misshaping the hat further and staining it with chalk dust.

Not long after, the boys mob Chips, and actually pull him down low enough that he cannot be seen.  Perhaps that is his hair visible in the right-hand still below, which might be the case if he had fallen only to his knees, but perhaps that is not his hair and he has been altogether flattened.  At most, there may be twelve boys encircling him, though the outer ring may consist more of spectators than attackers.

As headmaster Dr Wetherby enters, he is hit in the face by a flying book, which must have been thrown by a single student.  The headmaster proceeds to flaunt that he does not merely intend to inflict collective punishment on this one occasion, but that he has gloried in collective punishment for at least the past eighteen years.

The conclusion supported by our scrutiny of the opening-day mayhem is that only a small proportion of the class was involved in any one incident, and furthermore that if it tended to be the same boys involved in the various incidents, as is likely, that only a small proportion of the class bears any guilt.

As further evidence that the boys did not participate equally in the bedlam, we can see on the left below that they differ greatly in size, and since many of the misbehaviors could only have been accomplished by boys that are bigger and stronger, there is reason to suppose that the smaller and weaker boys contributed less.  And on the right below, we see the best evidence of differential participation — during the height of the harassment of Chips, most of the boys remain behind desks.  Some are far enough toward the back of the room that they can barely see what's happening, and cannot be imagined to share any responsibility for what others are doing at the front.

It seems to follow, therefore, that justice would have been served if the ringleaders — perhaps no more than half a dozen in number — had been identified and if they alone had been punished.  All the rest might have been no more than reprimanded either for not acting to stop the misconduct, or for not betraying the attack to the authorities while it was yet in the planning stage.  But to administer severe punishment to, say, 36 boys when only six of them deserve it is to punish five out of six of them unjustly, and to bring the administration of justice into disrepute.

We see, then, that Brookfield school endorses and practices the barbaric form of punishment known a collective punishment whose chief defect tends to be that the vast majority of those who are punished are guiltless.  Headmaster Dr Wetherby boasts that he has caned an entire class before, and so if he repeats the procedure in the present situation, it must be that during the intervening years he has had no occasion to review the propriety of doing so.  He is simply a twopenny tyrant who has become habituated to the application of brute force.

(2)  Mr Chips Collective Punishment Results in Brookfield's Loss of the Cricket Trophy Cup

Following the above donnybrook, the headmaster instructs Chips that unless he can learn to control a class he should think of pursuing a career other than teaching.  Taking the headmaster's admonition to heart, and imitating the Headmaster's precedent of collective punishment, Chips issues a detention order to his whole class for what offense we are not told, and to be served on the afternoon of the day of the offense.  So, here we have Chips' justice error number one — imposing collective punishment.

However, an important cricket match is to be played that same afternoon between Brookfield and its rival Sedbury, such that Chips' detention punishment will prove to be more severe than he had intended by the detained class being unable to attend the game.  Worse than that, Brookfield's best cricketer, Maynard, is in Chips' class, and so will be among those detained, and so will not get to play, and whose absence from the field will lower Brookfield's chances of winning.  Chips' punishment, therefore, will fall particularly heavily on Maynard, and furthermore might prove to be a punishment on the entire school, the punishment of losing the game, and of losing the trophy cup which is currently in Brookfield's possession.  The class brings this scheduling clash (between the detention and the cricket match) to Chips' attention, but he feels that the information was communicated so insolently that it was inadvisable for him to amend his decision.

Here, Chips commits his second error in administering justice — when good reason is brought to his attention for a re-scheduling, he refuses because of the impolite manner in which that good reason was communicated.  What Chips is doing here is punishing the class, including Maynard in particular, and the whole school too, in order to avenge himself on the person or persons who spoke to him impolitely.  Again, there is no attempt here to narrow the focus of punishment upon the wrongdoer or wrongdoers — Chips is happy to wreak his vengeance on everybody.  What he should have done was to allow the new information to defer the detention to a later time, and as a separate matter, to have taken whoever-it-was to task for impoliteness.

Neither Chips nor the other masters nor even the headmaster seem intelligent enough to recognize that no matter what Chips does, he cannot escape deviating from his original plan, and thus losing face for so deviating, granting for the sake of argument the film's assumption that a deviation so trivial does constitute a loss of face.  That is, if Chips re-schedules the detention, then he will be deviating from his original plan to hold it that afternoon; if he fails to re-schedule, then he will be deviating from his original plan to impose mild punishment.  Unable, along with the headmaster and other teachers, to recognize the inescapability of one deviation or the other, Chips opts for the wrong one, falsely imagining it to be no deviation at all, or somehow the lesser deviation, where in fact it is the one that will arouse the greatest discontent, the one that will do most to lower Chips in the students' esteem.

The foolishness of Chips' decision can be appreciated from another point of view, which is that the scheduling of the cricket match against Sedbury constitutes something like a prior contract which placed everybody at Brookfield and everybody at Sedbury under a network of obligations, as for example an obligation to Sedbury to provide a playing field and to provide the Brookfield cricket team, and even to provide Brookfield spectators who would join Sedbury spectators to watch the game from the bleachers.  An obligation to parents too, perhaps, to allow them to watch the match together with their children who were enrolled in Brookfield.  This implicit contract obligated all Brookfield students to attend so they could cheer their team.  The implicit contract obligated the full cricket team to play.  Therefore, Brookfield School had already bound all Brookfield students to this game in one capacity or another, and so that Chips had not the right or the authority to override that earlier contract.  In case of a clash, it is the Chips detention that should be overridden, because it was the later of the two, and also because it could be easily re-scheduled whereas the cricket match could not.  We see most unambiguously the significance of Brookfield yielding precedence to the Chips detention — the significance that Brookfield is being run by incompetents, run by a staff incapable of extricating themselves from the most elementary of dilemmas, run by a staff whose inability to administer elementary justice results in suffering and demoralization for the students.

LEFT BELOW:  Before he discovers that Chips intends to keep Maynard from playing, headmaster Dr Wetherby radiates optimism that Brookfield will keep the trophy cup that he gestures to in front of him:

RIGHT BELOW:  The class sits in detention while through the open windows can be heard the sounds of the cricket match that they are missing.  Best-player, Maynard, is in the foreground struggling mightily to focus on the assigned work.  Colley, on his left, looks with commiseration upon Maynard's particular suffering.   Given that this is collective punishment, it is conceivable that best-player Maynard took no part in whatever offense the class is being punished for.  It may be, for example, that several students didn't have their homework done, and in a pique Chips detained the entire class, and yet Maynard may have been one of the students who did have his homework done.  Maynard is furious because of the unfairness of the collective punishment, and he is doubly furious because twopenny tyrant Mr Chips refused to change the scheduling of the punishment, thus imposing on the entire class a much harsher punishment than had been intended, or than anyone in the class deserved.

Written on Maynard's face is his frustration at not being able to play for his cricket team and lead them to victory, and his hatred of Chips for the injustice of imposing collective punishment, and for his irrationality in refusing to reschedule the detention.

COLLEY:  Oh, all right sir!  Sedbury's beaten us.  We've lost the cup.  It's not just us, it's the whole school.  We know you don't care how the fellows feel.  Perhaps you don't want to be liked!  Perhaps you don't mind being hated!

(3)  Mr Chips' Summary Caning of Burton

By "summary" I mean "conducted without the customary legal formalities".  One customary legal formality is to adhere to approximately the following sequence: inform a person what offense he is accused of and what the evidence against him is, listen to his defense, decide if he is guilty, and if that decision is guilty, then punish him.

Mr Chips, in contrast, employs a different sequence.  First, he decides that someone is guilty of something, but doesn't tell anyone.  Next he punishes that someone, in this case by lashing him six times with a cane across the backside.  And only after the punishment does he disclose the offense, but cursorily and without any supporting evidence and thus without allowing the suspect to examine and challenge that evidence, and naturally without allowing the accused to present exculpatory evidence.

In short, the Chips procedure is punish first, disclose the offence afterward, and nothing more.

Mr Chips raises his voice to its loudest and most threatening when he repeats: "Get over that chair!"

In the face of Chips' heightened ferocity, Burton complies, and submits to his six lashes in silence.

And here is the totality of what was said:

But what was Burton caned for?  It was not for anything he had done prior to entering Chips' office — those were things Burton had already been punished for, or things that Chips merely wanted to discuss.  What Burton was lashed for was his angry and defiant outburst beginning with "I do it because".  Let us analyze this outburst, asking what there is in it that might deserve punishment.

One thing that Burton says in that one statement is that the masters act like "twopenny tyrants".  However, we have already seen above that not only masters but headmasters do in fact act like twopenny tyrants.  (It was in preparation for evaluating Burton's use of the expression "twopenny tyrants" that I scattered it in above discussions of injustice at Brookfield.)  We have seen the Brookfield headmaster acting like a twopenny tyrant when he caned an entire class for misconduct committed by something like six students in that class.  We have seen Chips acting like a twopenny tyrant when he imposed the collective punishment of detention on his class, and on top of that refused to reschedule that detention because he wanted revenge for having been spoken to impolitely, with the result that the class was subjected to punishment more severe than had been intended, and the school suffered the punishment of losing the match against Sedbury and forsaking the trophy cup.  And Chips is about to demonstrate again his predilection for twopenny tyranny by caning Burton without first informing him for what offence, and without hearing Burton's defense.  It is reasonable to expect that Burton has seen several instances of twopenny-tyranny at Brookfield, and that if asked to substantiate his accusation with data, would be able to.  On the question of twopenny tyranny, then, Burton is to be commended for having recognized that it exists, and for having had the courage to speak out concerning what he has recognized.

Next, Burton's statement that the masters are "a lot of weak-kneed women" is too vague to be evaluated, and the more concrete things that he says immediately after may be taken to explain what he means by "weak-kneed women".  The elaboration that Burton adds is that the masters are not in the army for three reasons: (1) they are unfit, (2) they are too old, and (3) they are too frightened.  However, Chips himself immediately agrees with the first two of these — that the Brookfield staff is not in the army because it is too unfit or too old.  Every one of them, says Chips, has been rejected for service for these two reasons.  He himself is headmaster only because he is too old to serve in the army.  So, as far as the first two reasons are concerned, Burton is right, and Chips agrees that Burton is right, and so we still have discovered no justification for caning.

That leaves only one thing that Burton says that might have justified caning.  Burton says that some masters have avoided military service because they are "too frightened", or in other words that they are cowards and shirkers.  It is not wrong of Burton to consider this possibility.  To prosecute war successfully, it is necessary and desirable that cowards and shirkers be watched for and identified.  If a malingerer could be proven to exist among the Brookfield staff, then it would promote the war effort to expose and shame him.  Burton's only fault here, then, would have had to be not that he identified shirkers, but that he misidentified them.  But Chips falls short of refuting Burton's accusation when he says "You might like to know that every one has done his best to join the army.  We take no man unless he has done that."  This assertion from Chips is not evidence, it is at best an introductory statement that would appropriately be made prior to the presentation of evidence.  That is, Chips does not follow his introductory statement with a list of masters, and with a production of documents showing good reason why each has been rejected for military service.  Rather, he implicitly demands that Burton accept this conclusion without proof.  And Chips does not ask what Burton's evidence is for believing that certain masters are "too frightened".  Maybe Burton has such evidence.  Maybe Burton has overheard one or more masters confess that they are not in the army because they fear being wounded or killed.  Maybe he has heard one or more masters admitting this openly, on more than one occasion, in the presence of witnesses other than Burton.  If Burton affirms that some masters are not in military service because they are "too frightened", it is unjust to punish him without asking to see his evidence.

In short, Burton and Chips have different perceptions of the Brookfield staff.  It is possible to ascertain which perception is more correct by examining the evidence for each side, but no such presentation of evidence is permitted, and so no weighing of evidence takes place.  And even if such a weighing of evidence did take place, and even if Burton were proven wrong, this would be no justification for caning him.  One does not cane a student for being mistaken, for not having taken into consideration evidence that was unavailable to him.  In fact, would it not have been the obligation of the Brookfield staff to stop suspicions from arising and rumors from circulating by publicly disclosing their reasons for not being in military service?  True, Burton relying on incomplete information might have arrived at an erroneous impression of shirking, but he did not arrive at that wrong impression by willfully ignoring available evidence to the contrary.  He did not slander a master out of sheer spite in disregard of reasons not to.  If Burton was under-informed it was because the staff chose to under-inform him, chose to project the false appearance of shirking or malingering or cowardice when it was within their power to project the true appearance of physical unfitness.  If Burton was wrong, then he was understandably wrong, and his error needed to be corrected by exchange of information.  What was not needed was to have his speaking on the question suppressed by caning.

What this movie projects, then, as a model for admiration is the exercise of brute and mindless force.  Burton was caned because he dared to speak of his superiors disrespectfully, caned even though that disrespect might have been deserved.  Mr Chips reconfirms our impression that he is a twopenny tyrant, and it might be conjectured the only reason that he is not a full-blown tyrant is that he has not been given the power to become one.  But he may be considered to be a tyrant to the full extent that circumstances permit.  He shows no capacity for submitting his own conduct to review by reason or by consideration of the due process that is necessary for justice to prevail.