Studios were still chasing the elusive, financial dream-come-true of "The Sound Of Music", a big-budget tuner that could capture the hearts (and box-office ticket cash) of moviegoing families worldwide....
And so countless millions of dollars got poured down the drain to produce a slew of these swollen, 3 hour long musical atrocities......some of them populated with stars who could neither sing or dance.
The especially sad thing about "Goodbye Mr. Chips".......inside the body of this cinematic Brontosaurus, a brilliant creative light shines, a world-class heart melting performance by Peter O' Toole in the title role of James Hilton's beloved teacher.
A smaller scale drama constructed around O'Toole's beautifully affecting work might have won the acclaim and attention the studio was after here.
But the overall pomposity and inflated self-importance of turning the story into a lengthy, epic musical finally overpowers the gifted actor at the center of it. The topic of conversation veered away from O'Toole and became all about the film's sky-high budget and its worthless, instantly forgettable song score by Leslie Bricusse.
Director Herbert Ross decided to make the bulk of these barely composed, sing-song noodlings function as off screen, internal monologues......a technique which only served to further slow down the already funeral-like pace of the film. While not as horrendous an idea as Joshua Logan's color-tinting the musical numbers in "South Pacific", Ross turned the film into a bigger disaster than it had to be.....critics had a field day ridiculing a musical that didn't even have the nerve to lets its actors open their mouths to sing.
The only creative musical talent in the film was none other than John Williams, working as the orchestrator/arranger. During the overture, he manages to turn Bricusses's mass of nothingness into a rich symphonic imitation of Rodgers & Hammerstein.........makes us wonder why they simply didn't ask Williams to have a go at writing the music to the nursery rhyme Bricusse lyrics.
But getting back to Peter 'O' Toole, he's the whole show here, the one saving grace that keeps you watching this elephantine relic of 1960's movie studio hubris. For him and him alone, we'll grade this schoolmaster on a steep, steep curve....with 2 stars (**). For the rest of it.....an F-minus.
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