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  • 10 months ago
A shy British teacher looks back nostalgically at his long career, taking note of the people who touched his life. | dG1fX1dtZlpqT01fN00
Transcript
00:00Hear ye. Hear ye. Alexander Wolcott, the town crier.
00:14This is Wolcott speaking. The town crier coming with good news to the microphone.
00:21This broadcast is a piece of personal testimony.
00:26I have just undergone the memorable experience of witnessing the best moving picture I have ever seen.
00:35I can testify that no moving picture ever stirred me as deeply as this one.
00:43It is called Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
00:47Never be afraid, Chips, that you can't do anything you've made up your mind to.
00:52As long as you believe in yourself, you can go as far as you dream.
00:58Certainly you'll be headmaster, if you want to.
01:04This is the screenplay that has just been made in England from a story written six years ago this fall by an obscure young Englishman.
01:14At that time he was comparatively unknown.
01:18A writer named James Hilton.
01:21Now translated into a screenplay by the same Englishman to whom we owe the unforgettable tragedy called Journey's End.
01:32Directed by an American, Sam Wood, who crossed the Atlantic for the purpose, and with the schoolmaster himself superbly embodied by the magnificent young actor named Robert Donat.
01:47Hilton's gentle masterpiece has at last found its way to the screen.
01:53I approached its preview with deep and legitimate apprehension.
01:59I realize and none better what havoc some movies can work with books that I have known and loved.
02:06I am the more obligated therefore to tell you that this time a beautiful and perhaps immortal story has been translated from one medium to another with tenderness and imagination and genius.
02:23In 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.
02:47But I am here only to testify that in my own experience the most moving of all moving pictures is the one called Goodbye Mr. Chips.
03:17To be warned!
03:47Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
03:56Goodbye.

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