Word: midwesternisms
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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...
...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...
Harvard may not be exactly a Midwestern University, but the connection is close enough so that "The Male Animal," with Old M. U. as its locale, strikes a responsive note. Probably all schools have trustees and intellectual English professors and football heroes of two generations, none of whom get along too well together. And therein, decided Messrs. Thurber and Nugent, lies a tale. Their treatment of the struggle between Professor Tommy Thompson, played most appealingly by Elliott Nugent himself, and the various and sundry trustees and All-Americans who try to rob him of his intellectual freedom and his wife...
...fascinating characters includes a worried old dean who goes home to his Ovaltine whenever the action gets hot; a radical editor with the playwrights' universal sign of radicalism-a shock of hair; and a telephone voice answering to the name of Hot Garters. Leon Ames as the former midwestern star back for homecoming is cast to perfection. Even without a capable set of actors, however, the Thurber humor in the lines would still make "The Male Animal" highly entertaining...