PROGRAMMING NOTE: If you missed it, check out yesterday’s KW/OU guest post on Trivia Factorial. You already read Trivia Factorial, right? Good—Trivia Factorial rules.

We’ve watched Peter O’Toole in three films so far, and in each of them, he’s dashing, vigorous, and masculine. In Lawrence of Arabia, he’s a man of action, a rogue whose blue eyes twinkle while he bucks against authority. In his two films playing Henry II, he’s insouciant and entitled, laughingly abusing his own power. So do you really think this extremely cool, extremely hot dude is gonna do a good job playing the milquetoast boarding school housemaster Mr. Chipping?

Oh, and by the way: Goodbye, Mr. Chips is a musical. Can Peter O’Toole even sing??

But I guess that’s why they call it acting—his transformation is magnificent. In the classroom, the nebbish, prim Chipping can be alternately imperious and tender, and outside it, he begins a fish-out-of-water relationship with theater actress Katherine Bridges (Petula Clark).1 They marry, the marriage softens Chips, and his students like him more.

They live a happy life filled with successes and failures until Katherine dies in a bombing during WWII. Mr. Chipping continues teaching. His wife is dead and he never fathered any children, but he’s not worried: he says he’s had “hundreds of children—all boys.”

Rating: 8/10. “Breaking Bad” was pitched as a show where Mr. Chips becomes Scarface, but Goodbye Mr. Chips demonstrates that you never needed the Scarface part.

Cast and Crew

Petula Clark’s a lifer in the entertainment industry. She was a multi-hyphenate from a young age, singing on the radio and acting in British films. Her fame was mostly confined to Britain, though, until a certain British Invasion. In fact, Clark was called “the First Lady of the British Invasion,” and a big part of that was the song she’s best known for: “Downtown.” I’m not trying to boil her career down to that one song, but, uh, here’s her Popular songs from Spotify and each of their play counts:

Clark hit #1 with “Downtown” and did it again with “My Love,” a song where she describes her love with platitudes like “warmer than the warmest sunshine,” “softer than a sigh,” “deeper than the deepest ocean,” and “wider than the sky.”2 Her movie career (in the U.S., anyhow) peaked in the late ‘60s when she starred in Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Finian’s Rainbow (1968).

Here’s the thing: this column can be myopically America-centric and this is one of those times. Petula Clark’s a mammoth talent with an incandescent career, and yet her name = “Downtown.” As an apology, here’s the boys on “Seinfeld” giving a dramatic reading of her biggest hit.

James Hilton may not have been twice as talented as Petula Clark, but nonetheless you’ve gotta know twice as many of his works. One is his novel “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” (1934); it was first turned into a 1939 film3 and then this 1969 musical. The other Hilton work to know is the novel “Lost Horizon” (1933), which is about a plane that crashes in the Himalayas. The survivors of the crash are taken to a paradisaical lamasery called Shangri-La, but the novel ends with the main character, Conway, leaving Shangri-La (and then regretting it). There’s probably a moral in there somewhere.

Hilton also wrote the screenplay for Mrs. Miniver (1942), for which he won an Oscar. Interestingly, Greer Garson starred in both Mrs. Miniver and the original Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Or maybe that’s not interesting—I’ve written so many of these posts that I can no longer tell.

Quick Hits:

• Michael Redgrave, the patriarch of the Redgrave family, played the headmaster of the Brookfield School. In a guest post on Camelot, my mother covered a film with Michael’s daughter (one of ‘em, anyway), Vanessa Redgrave.

• Playwright Terence Rattigan, whose Separate Tables we previously watched, wrote the screenplay for Goodbye, Mr. Chips. O’Toole once called Rattigan “the finest playwright of the latter half of the 20th century with Tennessee Williams.”

• The film’s producer wanted to reunite the Doctor Dolittle (1967) dream team [sic] of Rex Harrison and Samantha Eggar for this film. It would’ve made sense, as Goodbye, Mr. Chips’ songs were penned by the same guy who did the ones in Doctor Dolittle—Leslie Bricusse. But also, it’s really, really good that didn’t happen.

The Trivia

Chipping and Katherine fall in love in Pompeii, so we’re gonna discuss that. But first, uh, a whole bunch about the Roman calendar.

The Roman calendar was said to have been established by the legendary first king of Rome, Romulus (though, y’know, it probably wasn’t). It was broken into ten months, four with 31 days (“full”) and six with 30 days (“hollow”). That gave 304 days, or 38 eight-day weeks. The months were linked with the cycle of the moon4 and each month had some noteworthy days:

• The first day of the month, which occurred during the new moon, was called the kalends (that’s where we get the word “calendar” from).

• The nones occurred during the first-quarter moon, and were either the fifth or seventh day of the month (depending on what type of month it was).

• The ides—the ones you’ve gotta beware—occurred during the full moon on either the 13th or 15th day.5

The ancient king Numa added the months January and February6, bringing the year to 12 months of 355 days7. You can see the months of that calendar below.

Martius (now March) was the first month, which helps explain the prefixes on the months Quinctilis through December. Januarius was named for Janus, the god of beginnings, which is why it later was moved up to being the first month.

Then Julius Caesar and the Julian calendar. He saw the calendar with 355 days and added 10 more to it, giving us the months and days we’re used to. He also added a leap day, February 24th, that would be repeated once every four years.8 Still, there was drift, and that’s why we needed to go to the Gregorian Calendar, established in 1582.9

…did we do all of that just because Mr. Chipping offhandedly mentioned “ides”? Yes, yes we did. Alright, on to the fun [sic] stuff: Pompeii.

Pompeii is famous for being one of the Roman cities buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Thousands died, including the naturalist Pliny the Elder. The “other” city you’ll usually be asked to know that was destroyed was Herculaneum (though note that there were others, including Stabiae).

Because these cities were buried under volcanic ash, they’re extremely well-preserved and are active archaeological sites. Excavations began in the 1700s, and as Pompeii was excavated, it led to a resurgence of interest in Greek and Roman art. This contributed to the start of the Neoclassical movement.

In the film, Chipping’s guide at Pompeii points out a statue of a muse, claiming it to be Clio, the muse of history. Chipping corrects the guard, indicating the muse is actually Terpsichore, the muse of choral dance and song. Sometimes ya gotta just memorize a dumb list of names, and unfortunately, the muses are one of those dumb lists of names. Sorry.

But then there’s Pompeii in pop culture.

• That 2013 song “Pompeii” by Bastille. Or is it “Bastille” by Pompeii? Anyway, Bastille/Pompeii also had that 2018 song “Happier” with Marshmello.

• “The Last Days of Pompeii,” an 1834 novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Bulwer-Lytton comes up on “Jeopardy!” a fair amount, both for this novel and for “Paul Clifford” (1830), which starts with the legendary line “It was a dark and stormy night […]”

WARNING: as mentioned, Pompeii was destroyed by Mt. Vesuvius. There are two other well-known active Italian volcanoes—Etna and Stromboli—that you might mix up with Vesuvius. Don’t! Etna is on Sicily and Stromboli is on the Aeolian Islands.

Odds and Ends

Katherine performs the fictional “Flossie from Fulham” at the real Royal Victoria Theatre, which is known as the Old Vic…the three terms in British schools are Michaelmas Term, Hilary/Lent Term, and Trinity/Easter/Summer Term…the film’s underscore came from John Williams—yeah, that John Williams…one of the boys sings about wanting to be rich as Croesus, a wealthy historical king of Lydia…Chips wrote a textbook on Pindar, an ancient Greek poet from Thebes known for odes…the school’s architectural style is English Perpendicular, which refers to the Late phase of the Gothic style (also called Flamboyant)…Chips references the Tennyson poem “Break, Break, Break,” which begins “Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!”…Cassandra got her gift of prophecy from Apollo.

One last thing. We’ve talked lots about all these things you’ve gotta know—“Downtown,” James Hilton, Pompeii, muses, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whatever. But here’s a quote from Mr. Chips at the end of the film, as he privately looks back on his career:

I wonder if we were any use at all. I mean. What did we ever teach the boys? How to parse a sentence in ancient Greek? Was that going to help them today? Was it? Well, I suppose we did teach them one thing: How to behave to each other. Yes, we did try to teach them that. And is there anything more important to teach people than that, is there?

I meant to cover “how to behave to each other” in this post but I got caught up talking about the Roman calendar. Maybe we’ll get to it next week.

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