Cheers for Miss Bishop

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Cheers for Miss Bishop is a 1941 film based on the novel Miss Bishop by Bess Streeter Aldrich. It was directed by Tay Garnett and stars Martha Scott in the title role. The other cast members include William Gargan, Edmund Gwenn, Sterling Holloway, Dorothy Peterson, Don Douglas and Sidney Blackmer.

[edit] Plot

Miss Ella Bishop is a teacher at a small town Midwestern college. The story is told in flashback and takes place over many years, from the 1880s to the 1930s, showing her from her freshman year to her retirement as an old woman. At the beginning she lives with her mother and vixenish cousin Amy, and remembers when her father had a farm near the town. Ella is an inhibited girl whose frustrations grow as she approaches womanhood. As a women, her ambition to teach causes her to lose her only opportunity for true love, and her life becomes one of missed chances and wrong choices. She is engaged to lawyer Delbert Thompson, but she learns, to her distress, that Amy is pregnant by him. He runs off with Amy, but later Amy dies in childbirth, leving Ella to care for Amy's daughter Hope. Hope grows up and marries Richard, and they move away and have a daughter named Gretchen. Ella also has a fling with another teacher, the unhappily married John Stevens, but eventually calls off the relationship; later she is distressed to learn that Stevens has been killed. Through all the years Ella is supported by her friend Sam Peters, a local grocer, and, until his death, Professor Corcoran, the college president who hires her as a teacher and persuades her to stay when she considers leaving. As Ella reaches old age, she reflects back and realizes she allowed the years to go by without achieving what she believes to be her true fulfillment. However, her years have not been without glory, and her moment of triumph arrives when her numerous now-famous students from over the years, return to a testimonial dinner at the school to honour their beloved Miss Bishop.