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In an expert piece of sentiment called Goodbye, Mr. Chips, a young English actress, who looked rather like a goddess sculptured in butterscotch, made her brief screen debut, and without fair warning even to herself, stole the film. Though nobody clearly realized it at the time (four years ago), she also started something new in screen history.
The something new was to make Mrs. Miniver and Random Harvest two of the five greatest screen hits ever manufactured. It was to explain every success that the young actress, whose name was Greer Garson, has had since. It was slowly to crystallize and congeal Miss Garson's vivid, rangy talent for acting, and to lift it to an eminence comparable to that of St. Simeon Stylites: high, conspicuous, and not without grandeur, but without much room to turn around in. In fact, it was to doom and royally imprison Cinemactress Garson, very possibly for the rest of a career which culminated this week in the soberly splendid scientific romance, Madame Curie. For Hollywood and for Greer Garson, the picture was one of the scariest jobs either had ever undertaken. But, given the fusion of their compensating formulas, success was almost chemically inevitable.
For what cinemaddicts saw in Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Greer Garson, was something old and cherished in their hearts, but new and unexpected on the screen—the Ideal (if overidealized) Woman. Not a full-bosomed, cottontailed babe, a chromium goddess, an uncrowned martyr or a vampire bat, but a woman who simply looked and acted the way any grownup, good woman should. Miss Garson's beauty was neither parasitic nor predatory, but rich and kind. She wore the sort of ample, archaic dresses in which many cinemaddicts tenderly remembered themselves, their wives, or their mothers. She did not make love like a saber-toothed tiger. She treated shy, fumbling Schoolmaster Chips (as every shy, fumbling cinemaddict could see) gaily, gently, generously. She turned him into a shining and confident husband. And when she died in childbirth, she mowed down her audience in great emotional windrows, and left them gnashing their handkerchiefs and begging for more.
Beauty and the Box Office. Through Cinemactress Garson, Hollywood had stumbled upon, and reawakened in millions of people, a recognition of the dignity and beauty of mature womanhood. It had also stumbled upon one of the richest box-office formulas and one of the greatest potential box-office figures in its 50 years of prospecting. Not knowing at first what a radioactive element it had in hand, Hollywood kept right on stumbling and immediately miscast Miss Garson. Of her next film, Remember, she says simply: "Let's not." Pride and Prejudice was a harmless excursion into literature, but in the Garson career it was a round trip. Blossoms in the Dust at least surrounded Miss Garson with children, though they were other people's, and illegitimate, to boot. More important, it first mated this predestined dove with Walter Pidgeon. Blossoms was Miss Garson's first real hit as a leading lady. But where Blossoms fumbled for the Garson beam, Mrs. Miniver found it, and rode it into box-office history. Random Harvest rode it right out of the park.