Goodbye, Katherine

My last post was titled 'Notes from the Weekend, Part I'. You'll notice there has been no part II. Busy week at work. Those things happen. Now I have a three day weekend coming up so I'll try to catch up.

I actually had written a Part II early last week. It had to do with Frank Sinatra and his development from a 1940s crooner to the individual stylist he became once he moved from Columbia records to Capitol. It was good stuff - perceptive, witty, urbane, highly entertaining. Well, maybe not. It was long though - I spent a lot of time on it. I just needed to polish it up a bit for publication. Then I tried cutting and pasting the content from one blog post window into another. Unfortunately, the paste didn't work. So I went back to the original post window to try it again - and it was gone. It was not in my buffer. I never cut and paste - I always copy and paste, just in case. Except for this time. I think I know what happened - no need to bore you with details. It has to do with this blogging software, which saves every few seconds. But the bottom line is, my Sinatra epic was lost. Stupid me.

Anyhow, as I mentioned in my last post, I spent last weekend listening to Frank and watching movies. I wanted to comment on two of the movies, one old one, one new one. The old one was Goodbye, Mr. Chips, starring Robert Donat and Greer Garson, which I believe a lot of people consider a classic. I could see the point through the first hour of the movie - it was utterly charming. The story of Chips and Katherine's romance - the ackward older gentleman, a confirmed bachelor who had never considered the possibility of love, falling so tenderly for the beautiful younger woman, and she returning his passion unrequitedly - is played out with such empathy that it enters into the realm of movie magic. We're in fairy tale land, and it's a good place to be.

Then they kill off Katherine. Now, I understand that the movie makers had to introduce some dramatic conflict. They could not simply have Chips and Katherine live happily ever after. But this was a jolt - it comes out of the blue and seems to violate the tone of the movie. I was charmed - then disturbed. Couldn't they have simply made Katherine gravely ill, only to recover? There could have been a segment showing Chips, scared of losing her, regressing back to the rigid and feared schoolmaster that he once was. Upon her recovery we could have had the cathartic scene in which he realizes his mistake. Katherine's presence in Chips' life had changed him. Now that he had her back he would never go back to being the old Chips. He would forever after try to live up to Katherine's ideal for him - that of the beloved teacher to his students. The movie could have proceeded from there with and Chips' large-spirited nature would have seemed more appropriate. Instead, Chips goes to teach his class immediately after Katherine dies out of a sense of duty, and we see him sitting at his desk staring dumfoundedly into the void for a few seconds - and then we're off to the next segment of the movie. But with Katherine gone the movie has lost something, and not just Greer Garson's luminous beauty. There's an emptiness about it that can't be made up for, even during the final segment when Chips, a very old man by now, comes out of retirement to head up the school during World War I. It seems almost tacked on in an attempt to prove once again Chips' noble and giving nature. But it occurred to me that if they had waited to just before this point to have Katherine die, if she had died of natural causes after a long life together with Chips, even this final segment would have played better. Chips could gather himself to do his duty even in the face of despair. It would be his final tribute to the school and to Katherine.

To reiterate, the movie would have been stronger, a pure delight, if Katherine had not been disposed of so soon and so tragically. I'd have done it differently.

I'll blog separately about the new movie we watched last weekend, The Lives of Others.