The Browning Version (1951)

 Anthony Asquith's "The Browning Version"

I was very caught off guard by Anthony Asquith's 1951 British film "The Browning Version." Going into it, I wasn't sure what to expect. Regardless, what I received was something far more emotionally complex than anticipated. 

The film centers on Andrew Crocker-Harris, an embittered, middle-aged schoolmaster. He is resigning from his post due to his poor health, his wife is cheating on him, and the person she's cheating on him with is the one replacing him at his post. This sets off a series of emotional and existential reflections on whether his hardnose and authoritarian teaching methods made any difference with the students throughout his teaching career. However, one grateful student forces Crocker-Harris into an emotional reckoning.

The film forces reflection on one's life and the difference we make in the lives of those around us. Perhaps you hold too tightly to your ideals and perhaps you've reached a point in your life where those ideals are now 'out of date.' I'm not entirely sure that our protagonist, Crocker-Harris, was inherently in the wrong for his style of teaching. Perhaps he was able to be more successful in getting students to retain knowledge. However, the fact remains that, at the end of his tenure, Crocker-Harris was disliked by his students, disliked by his fellow faculty, and disliked by even his own wife. The only saving grace is the one student who went out of his way to provide the saddened profession a thoughtful gift, which provides the title of the film. This one small gesture could be seen as this student attempting to secure a promotion from Crocker-Harris and his behavior seen as 'sucking up' to get something out of it. This becomes the most prominent question from the film: Is the boy genuine in his affection for Crocker-Harris? I suppose how you answer that question is how you choose to view the half-full or half-empty glass. Do you have hope that that one source of salvation? Or are you nihilistic in believing that every interaction with the boy is only a ploy? How you respond will reveal how you view the relationships of the people around you.

I very much enjoyed the film, and feel as though it is worth a watch or two in my lifetime. It's a film that forces self-reflection to one's life and how one has been behaving and practicing their philosophical notions of behavior. Perhaps the film is even reflective of its native country's struggles with modernity. The authoritarian schoolteacher is perhaps a symbolic notion of Great Britain pre-war, its etiquette, its behavior, and its understanding of instructing society. However, in the new post-war landscape, those ideals are now old hat. The new method of behavior lies more with the science teacher shown earlier in the film. Although his students are less adherent to 'behaving' themselves and staying quiet, their interactivity with the professor and his science experiences creates a new interactive style of learning and a new path for social response. "The Browning Version" begs the question: are our classical British methods of etiquette, adherence, and authority something that has fallen away with the falling generations?