School Marms

SCHOOL MARMS
by Les Phillips

Here are two versions of an old fashioned American teacher narrative: small town schoolteachers who give life lessons along with book learning, who mold the lives of their pupils. But there are useful versions of that homily, and then there are other versions...

Good Morning, Miss Dove (1955, directed by Henry Koster).
The film presents us with Miss Dove and her thirty-plus years of teaching. She is ill, perhaps dying, and the citizens of Liberty Hill rally to her side. The Rotary Club offers to pay for her surgery, “at the Mayo Clinic, at Johns Hopkins, anywhere.” Several of the town’s prodigal sons and daughters parachute in from distant cities to pay their respects to Miss Dove. The butcher and the banker were her students; so was her nurse, there in the hospital, and so were her doctors. All of them talk about how profoundly Miss Dove influenced their lives and careers. And we get flashbacks, vignettes from Miss Dove’s long life. We’re about to see exactly why Miss Dove was so special...

And quickly it comes clear: Miss Dove was a titanic pain in the ass. Twice we encounter her fabled teaching method, which consists of reading passages from the textbook in a monotone, and doling out punishments to those who don’t transcribe each word faithfully. When the kids aren’t sentenced to a week on the “posture correction stool,” they’re kept busy “memorizing the agricultural products of the Argentine pampas.” And, always, always, they were condescended to, because Miss Dove always condescended to persons of all ages, every minute of her life. In her spare time, she wanders around Liberty Hill, correcting the shopkeepers’ grammar and mores. Why is everyone flocking to her bedside? No, not to make certain that the old bag is really going to die, though that’s worth a minute’s thought. The truth is that Miss Dove’s students have something very powerful in common: they are all masochists, and, though they now have families and careers and achievements of their own, they long for one last dose of Miss Dove’s perfectly articulated, withering condescension.

And she gives it to them.

Good Morning, Miss Dove celebrates the common school as an expression of democracy, and Miss Dove is certainly a democrat: rich children are treated as disdainfully as poor children, and kids who can’t speak English receive the same assignments as everyone else. It’s true that certain scenes display her virtues, but these flashes of wisdom and perseverance are ultimately less impressive than the Gradgrindery and the insistent moralizing [NOTHING IS ACHIEVED BY SWEARING – write it, one thousand times] and the posture correction stool.

Jennifer Jones plays Miss Dove. It’s a perfectly rigid performance, and that might be part of the problem. Miss Dove is supposed to sound cold and distant, but I don’t think she’s supposed to sound like Beldar Conehead. It’s only fitting that Jones shares billing with Dwight D. Eisenhower! His picture is on the classroom wall, and IMDB actually credits him [“Dwight D. Eisenhower: Himself, in photo (uncredited)”]. “The Republic summons Ike, the mausoleum in its heart..."

Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941, directed by Tay Garnett).
Many of the same assumptions, the same structure, much of the same doctrine; but this one I like. The aged Miss Bishop is retiring from her long career as a college teacher, and there’s a special dinner, attended by many of her former students and colleagues. She’s taught freshman English at Midwestern State College from the day of her own graduation from its very first class – we see its main building under construction, visible from the Bishop farmhouse. The story begins in 1880 and continues into the 1930s, and there’s more than a bit of social history along the way. (A photograph of Grover Cleveland plays a cameo role.) he town and college grow and change, and so does Miss Bishop, who seems to be capable of teaching grammar without losing her sense of humor. Ella has real friends, including men friends; she raises her orphaned niece, and does it well if imperfectly; she makes mistakes and admits them. She is, in short, a teacher you might really like to learn from. And Midwestern State seems to do what land grant universities – one of the unique achievements of American culture – were designed to do: take in all kinds of students, and make them into educated men and women. I mean educated, not trained.

Martha Scott plays Ella Bishop. She is a lovely actress, the original Emily Webb in Our Town – both on stage and in the film. Myself, I remember her fondly as Bob Newhart’s mother on the first Bob Newhart Show. She did lots of stage and TV; I’m not sure why she didn’t have a stronger career in movies. Scott gives an energetic, ingenuous, joyful performance. And she plays an old lady better than Jennifer Jones plays a young one.