Cheers For Miss Bishop (United Artists) is Victoria Regina laid in a small Midwestern university, with a farm-bred schoolteacher replacing Queen Victoria, farm-bred Actress Martha Scott replacing Helen Hayes. Carefully chosen to build up Actress Scott, whose only previous pictures were Our Town (in which she played the same part she created on the stage) and last year's memorable The Howards of Virginia, Cheers For Miss Bishop sticks doggedly to its job, provides some heartwarming scenes without getting anywhere in particular.
Ella Bishop (Miss Scott) is a country girl with a thirst for knowledge, no taste for fun or marriage, when she turns up at half-completed Midwestern University for its first session. Graduated with honors she gets a job teaching freshman English, stays on at Midwestern for 51 years while presidents come and go and the little prairie college becomes a mammoth institution.
Waiting to marry Miss Bishop in the beginning is fond, soft-spoken Sam Peters (William Gargan). He is still waiting at the end. Meanwhile, Miss Bishop almost forgets her academic career when she falls in love with a dashing young lawyer, Delbert Thompson (Donald Douglas). When he gets her man-mad cousin in trouble she gives him up, goes back into her shell. Next time she thinks of marrying it is a soulful professor at Midwestern John Stevens (Sidney Blackmer), but he turns out to have a wife in Virginia. Miss Bishop will not be unfaithful to her mission as a teacher by going off to Italy with Professor Stevens. Instead, she contents herself with raising the child Del Thompson left her cousin.
Through these trials and tribulations, Actress Scott gives a graceful performance in the time-hallowed actors' feat of getting old convincingly. The acting performances in Cheers For Miss Bishop are smooth and polished all around. But the story is a" dull record punctuated with some vivid moments. It has at times the musty odor of a family album. It is authentic, but the breath of life is not in it.
For Martha Scott, who once expected to a teacher, got her A.B. in 1934 at the University of Michigan, Miss Bishop is no unfamiliar story. Born in Jamesport, Mo. (pop. 761), daughter of an electrical engineer, Martha took up dramatics in high school to get over an inferiority complex After college she worked awhile in a department store at $11.50 a week, finally got a job in Detroit's civic repertory theatre, moved on to Manhattan. She belongs to the "sensible" school of Hollywood actresses, dresses sloppily in slacks and checked blouse, drives her own Buick convertible, stays away from nightclubs.
In Rome, a nephew of the late Carlo Lorenzini, who wrote Pinocchio, asked the Ministry for Popular Culture to sue Walt Disney for libel. Charge: Disney's film so distorted the character of Pinocchio that "he easily could be mistaken for American."