Henry VIII
Conclusion
Cinematic qualities?
Why make a film about the royals?
So what do we conclude about Henry? Greed, unfair and irrational distribution of power,
damaging demands of modern life and meeting expectations.
Tony S
Overweight, vulnerable, volatile, tendency to darken brow, dead eyes, what servants call
“black moods”
[Director] Korda articulates this ideological standpoint in several important ways: his
casting of Charles Laughton as Henry who is played with childlike sympathy and
humour, the major focus being on his over-eating; Henry being cajoaled into successive
marriages by his advisers, seemingly not responsible for his wives’ executions […] the
inclusion of proletarian servants who gossip about Henry’s love-life as if they were his
friends; splendid costumes and set pieces of royal pageantry. Henry’s statist and religious
machinations are entirely absent, as is the violence of the Tudor period.” Street 41
United Artists, attempt to make quality British film and make money in America
Premiered in New York
Korda’s London Studios
The enormous success of Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII both in Europe and
America encouraged emulation by other producers. This film was a definitive innovation
in the field, and provides a clear marker of a new cinematic type. It presented history and
the monarchy in a domestic and humanised light. Korda’s film is crucial in any history of
British film culture; but it also stimulated a range of official anxieties, since it was
thought to depict authority in a debased manner. The film thus revealed a series of
interlocking concerns about verisimilitude and social accountability” (Harper, 9).
Previous ban on “lampoons on the institution of monarchy, and libelous reflections on
royal persons or families whether British or not” (Harper 12).
Goodbye Mister Chips!
Clips
Opening Credits
Lion background
Similar to The Lady Vanishes the film’s opening shot takes us from
1.00
1492: The year that Columbus discovers America
One can almost feel the centuries
Heart of England: gentle beat
ancestor of yours
Drake
9
26 ice cakes
enough of your loathsome statistics
things is different now
41 Up here there is no past, etc.
Start life over again
117.20 Times changing
119.30 New style of things
Nonsense:
Trying to make Brookfield up to date
Trying to run like a factory
Raise the fees: frozen out
Give a boy a sense of humor
128
Manchester regiment
Excitement
129
Boys who gave lives to country
17 years
2 days later killed
But I’m 16 in a bit sir
137
Caesar: of secondary importance
Can’t judge by the noise they make
Reads out name of German: the enemy: one of Chips’s funny ideas
I prefer to hope that tomorrow never comes
Get out you beast
Prefects
Identical white boys
Grandfather’s trousers
French Sudan
Canings: I have lost none of my vigor
Cricket green
Rugger matches
Triumphant music
Death of former headmaster: bust
German teacher
Me go abroad?
human beings were never designed to be that speed
militant lesbians!
Under the protection of the British consul
Last muffin means 10 thousand a year and a good wife
Reads Dickens kneeling at his feet
Lighter paint in the hall, a bit gloomy
“The presumption of the woman!”
Harry Potter
One of those new telephones at home
Remember you’re not the first master who stood there and felt afraid
Chips: 1870
In my mind you remain boys
Some archduke’s been murdered in a foreign part
Ominous, drone
The film begins in a similar way to The Lady Vanishes: its opening shot takes us down
from a landmark that anchors us in a particular locale
Intro
Not long after The Lady Vanishes Hitchcock himself would vanish from Europe, to
reappear in Hollywood where he would become the industry’s most conspicuous director
for several decades to follow. In between he was being courted by an interesting new
division within international film production: MGM-British. Hitchcock in some respects
might have been the perfect person to try and achieve the balance for which this new
transatlantic initiative was striving, but it was not to be: Hitch was too much of an
individual spirit, holding out for the opportunity to have greater freedom to pursue his
unique creative vision.
In the event, MGM-British would turn to something like the opposite, garnering its
success by making unadventurous films that presented England and English life in safe,
stable forms. The most popular of their movies was based around close to fifty years in a
school that had existed for close to five centuries: Goodbye, Mr. Chips. There were to be
few surprises here. This was of course 1939: not a time to start rocking the boat. But then,
why bother to make British films at all? Why not just keep churning out the same
Hollywood formulas? Surely this was a safer investment for a serious business? Of
course it was, and standard Hollywood production continued to go on, but clearly there
was a further demand for whatever British films could provide that they couldn’t.
They may not have the iconic, seductive appeal of a pointed British sensibility like that
attributed to Hitchcock, but it seems that these films—in the figure of Mr. Chips
especially—had a comforting yet distinctive character that drew audiences to them.
Perhaps more than most other films there is however a recognition here that the world—
the Britain—where the film takes place is a fictional one constructed to block out one that
is far uglier. This is an alternative world into which we can escape.
Indeed, the school where the film takes place is no more real than Hogwarts: the secret
school for wizards attended by Harry Potter. Indeed, there might seem to be a great deal
of similarity between the two, with their similarly enormous gothic dining halls and
intimidating black cloaked teachers. Yet we might argue that just as with J.K. Rowling’s
enormously popular fantasy series, the viewers of Goodbye, Mister Chips are just as
capable of realizing that they are observing a world of make-believe. Like Harry Potter,
the school where the film takes place has the status of myth. X School is the kind of place
we know we are only imagining still exists, or ever existed in the first place.
Yet, even if there is a recognition that this is a constructed world, with this might come
the determination on the viewer’s part to bring their own world closer to the one they see.
This is especially true in the case of an American audience: they can, on some level,
construct whatever Britain they want to have, just as Europeans looking at the US can see
pretty much whatever they want their eyes to see. It’s little surprise that American
tourists in the UK typically visit cities such as York, Bath and Oxford—sites of ancient
civilization, gentility, learning. Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow make the grade less
often; these cities of slave trading, industrialization and urban poverty don’t fit the
criteria these visitors demand, despite being considered among the most significant areas
in modern Britain. Such perceptions are always feeding back into and remolding the very
institutions they started with. British boarding schools upholding traditions that purport to
go back centuries, however dubious, remain very popular, especially with Americans.
It is worth asking about the ways that this film is “in” the real world and modern Britain
and the ways that it is in a world of its own. Such a dynamic, we will see, is central to the
movie, and creates a complicated dialectic of which the film urgently makes us aware.
But first we might want to ask where the film came from, since its British pedigree is less
certain than we might think.
British Cinema
As the 1930s wore on it became clear that Hollywood’s star was not on the wane, and the
continued success of American films in Britain lead to new quotas increasing the number
of British films that cinemas were required to show in an effort to stem the tide. Yet by
this stage American studios had become wise to the ways that these requirements could
be turned to their advantage, allowing them not only to make films that would play well
as British movies in the UK, but which could also be received successfully in the U.S.
The British division of MGM pursued this aim, most effectively producing films that
were classed as homegrown but which were unusually glossy for British based
productions, giving them unique value on both sides of the Atlantic.
As X observes, the MGM-British films “were intended to be transatlantic rather than
truly British, which would ensure that they had appeal in the United States as well as in
Britain. Indeed, MGM-British was simply another production unit within MGM, like the
many units that existed within the California studio. The stories were chosen and
approved by MGM’s own executives, and the initial treatments were written in California
by MGM’s own writers.” Indeed, we even know that MGM sent over writers from
America to oversee British teams, often to the outrage of the British head of production
(Unknown 30s 68). The British Isles are perceived here as just another lot on the global
movie studio, a colony under an imperial power which is beginning to rival that of the
nation state: the multinational corporation.
It is little surprise that, in the face of these forces, firm assertions of national
identification start to seem especially unsteady, especially in the case of international
cinema. After all, what does the designation “British film” mean in a context of
international production? As X observes, the MGM-British pictures “were British films
only by virtue of being filmed in Britain. They also bear striking similarities to
Hollywood’s own ‘British’ films; films that were made in Hollywood, but set in Britain
and usually based on British literature or history.” (Unknown 30s 69). In these ways, the
world of Goodbye, Mr. Chips is as distant as that encountered in David Copperfield. Yet
at the same time the film dramatizes the process by which this world came to seem
distant. This is very much a process of which the film is aware.
Chips: based on novella
“seemed to be a sad farewell to all things English.” It became the most popular of the
MGM-British films. (Unknown 30s 70).
N 56 gross, etc.
I know the world’s changing. I’ve seen all the old traditions dying one by one … grace
and dignity and a feeling for the past … You’re trying to run the school like a machine
for turning out money-mad, machine-mad snobs …. Modern methods! Poppycock! Give
a boy a sense of humour and a sense of proportion and he’ll stand up to anything.