1939 – Robert Donat (WINNER)

1939 – Robert Donat

Goodbye Mr. Chips

Ok, so Robert Donat won the award for Best Actor, and I’m not so sure I agree with his win.  Don’t get me wrong, he turned in a pretty good performance, but I might have voted for Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind.  And the reason is that Donat didn’t create so much of a character, as he created a caricature.  He played the title role of Mr. Chips, and was required to play him in different stages of life between the ages of twenty-five and eighty-eight.  And in true British fashion, he played a nearly emotionless stick-in-the-mud.  That is, until he becomes really old.  Then he becomes a nearly spry cartoon character.

I don’t know.  In his youth, he acted old, and when he was old, he acted young.  Maybe that was the way the part was written, but there was a little bit of a disconnect in my brain.  Still, Mr. Chips was a likeable enough character, no matter what age he was portraying.  And Donat did a fine job bringing him to life.  I think maybe he was a little overshadowed whenever he shared the screen with Greer Garson, but that actually lent itself well to the story being told.

Still, I suppose there were a couple of scenes in which Donat earned his award, like the scene in which he proposes to his future wife, while chasing down the train that is taking her away from him.  That was well-acted.  And then there was the scene in which his wife dies in childbirth.  The utter devastation in his face was powerful.  And then there was the scene where he is reading the names of his former students and colleagues who have died in the first World War.  There was no doubt that Donat was a skilled actor.

But I’ll go back to my earlier argument.  When he played the old man, I just didn’t buy it.  He behaved too much like a young man who was pretending to be old.  The makeup artists did a fantastic job, and he really looked the part, but there was just something in the way he behaved, the brightness in his eyes, the bounce in his step, that ruined the illusion of age for me.  So what am I saying?  Did he deserve his Oscar?  Yes, he did.  Did Clark Gable deserve it more?  I think, yes, he did.  At the very least, Gable’s performance displayed a lot more passion.