The Corn Is Green (1945) -

A tedious (although ostensibly comic) account of a teacher's transformative impact on the life of one Welsh miner, and the sacrifices entailed by that devotion. Based on an autobiographical play by Emlyn Williams (one of the most successful playwrights of the 1930s), the story tells of Miss Moffat (Bette Davis, doing well enough), a highly educated spinster teacher who arrives to a Welsh mining town. Through her tutelage, the largely illiterate, poverty-plagued town discovers the delight of reading and one particularly gifted student (the ever-strange Richard Ball) earns a scholarship to Oxford. Two main obstacles beset Miss Moffatt's success in the town. First, the anti-intellectual (and at times explicitly misogynist) bias against her; second, the temptations that goad her prize pupil in the form of drink and in the form of a trashy young woman. (The trashy young woman is the daughter of Moffatt's cockney maid, played with atrocious verve by Supporting Actress nominee Joan Lorring.) Mildred Dunnock is sweet as a sensitive fellow teacher/spinster. The story legibly contributes to the formation of the basic template of the "heroic teacher" genre. The final twist, though -- wherein Moffat adopts her prize pupil's illegitimate child so the trashy girl will leave him alone and so that he can move on to Oxford -- is a doozy. There are few pleasures in the film to recommend it. The delight in Welsh local color is at times sweet (there's one tertiary character who delivers a telegram wearing a folk costume straight out of a "costumes of their native lands" volume). Dunnock and Davis acquit themselves respectably. The rest of the cast is a little less effective from this distance. The accents are pure Hollywood, with the exertions toward Cockney and Welsh being especially unfortunate. But, in general, the film is awkward and unpleasant -- a sentimental feel-good picture with little cinematic art to the storytelling. (Indeed, watching this made me appreciate the wit and nuance of Come to the Stable -- imagine that.) The culminating confrontation between Davis's Moffat and Lorring's Bessie holds the promise of a grand camp throwdown, but the overweening respectability of the project impedes the scavenging of even the simplest camp pleasures. Plus, Lorring is just not good as the trashy Bessie. A mostly unfortunate piece of self-impressed pap.