Goodbye, Mr Chips

Incredibly bloated remake, with Mrs Chips an ex-showgirl (allowing for some vacuous songs), a continental holiday (allowing for a travelogue wallow), and Herbert Ross (his first film as director), trying to match Wyler's choreographed camera movements on Funny Girl but failing to make them serve any meaningful purpose. The pity of it is that Peter O'Toole sketches an excellent performance amid the debris - angular and desiccated as a stick insect, but endowing the character with both an inside and an outside, so that his metamorphosis from passionless pedant into loveable eccentric is perfectly credible. Good support too, from Redgrave and Bryant in particular, but they're trapped like flies in the sticky confection.