Good Morning, Miss Dove

Miss Dove, who has taught geography in a small town for forty years, is taken to hospital. Waiting for surgery, she finds her visitors are all former pupils: a doctor, a policeman, a minister, a nurse. Each visit opens a flashback. The film is not interested in teaching. It is interested in the arithmetic behind the severity: as a young woman Miss Dove had to bind her life to the town to pay her father's debts, and from that day she surrendered herself entirely to rules. The film builds her not as a lovable teacher but as someone who punished herself. The form is partitioned: the hospital room in the present, the flashbacks across different years. Colour and widescreen, fifties studio aesthetics. Henry Koster directed, from Frances Gray Patton's novel. Koster was making large-scale work in those years; this is smaller and more enclosed by comparison. Jennifer Jones plays Miss Dove and Robert Stack the doctor. Jones was aged with makeup for the part and played the character's youth herself. Who it is for: viewers who like classical Hollywood melodrama and stories about teachers. Who it is not for: anyone avoiding sentiment. The film openly goes for tears towards the end, and most of its characters amount to a single trait.