00:00Hear ye, hear ye, Alexander Wilkett, the town crier.
00:14This is Wilkett speaking.
00:17The town crier coming with good news to the microphone.
00:21This broadcast is a piece of personal testimony.
00:24I have just undergone the memorable experience of witnessing the best moving picture I have ever seen.
00:34I can testify that no moving picture ever stirred me as deeply as this one.
00:42It is called Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
00:46Never be afraid, Chips, that you can't do anything you've made up your mind to.
00:50As long as you believe in yourself, you can go as far as you dream.
00:57Certainly you'll be headmaster, if you want to.
01:03This is the screenplay that has just been made in England from a story written six years ago this fall by an obscure young Englishman.
01:13At 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.
01:31Directed 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,
01:45Hilton's Gentle Masterpiece, has at last found its way to the screen.
01:52I approached its preview with deep and legitimate apprehension.
01:57I realized, and none better, what havoc some movies can work with books that I have known and loved.
02:05I 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.
02:22In a year in which the great nations of the world seem to be choosing partners for a dance of death,
02:31this 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.
02:45But 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.
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