Reassessing Going My Way

I think I've mentioned a couple of times in the past that I have a disdain for the movie Going My Way, and that I think it's one of the times the people who vote on the Academy Awards really got things wrong. It's on TCM as part of 31 Days of Oscar, and that airing comes up tonight, February 26, at 8:00 PM. As I had it on my DVR, I figured I'd give it another watch to do an in-depth post on it.

Bing Crosby won the Best Actor Oscar, although we first see the other Best Actor nominee, Barry Fitzgerald. (Fitzgerald was nominated for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, winning the latter. The Academy changed the rules so that this couldn't happen again.) Fitzgerald plays Fr. Fitzgibbon, who's been the head priest at the parish of St. Dominic's in New York ever since the church was consecrated back in the 1890s. The church has a mortgage on it, which the holder, Ted Haines Sr. (Gene Lockhart) wants to call in, and Fr. Fitzgibbon is up there in years. It's to the point where he should probably just retire, so the bishop sends in another priest ostensibly as an assistant but whose real job is to take over. That priest is Fr. O'Malley (Bing Crosby).

Fr. O'Malley has a backstory of his own. He grew up in St. Louis and had to choose between music and the priesthood, obviously having selected the latter. His childhood friend Timothy O'Dowd (Frank McHugh) also became a priest, and is working in a neighboring parish. Anyhow, before accepting the calling to become a priest, O'Malley had a girlfriend named Jenny who was a musical talent herself, eventually joining an opera company and traveling the world. It's that travel that caused her not to receive the letter from O'Malley informing her that he was going to take Holy Orders and could therefore no longer have her as a girlfriend. She goes on to bigger things, changes her name to Genevieve (Risë Stevens) and becomes a singer at the Met, running into O'Malley again.

O'Malley, as the stereotypical newcomer often does, shakes things up as everybody seems to love him. He helps a young woman named Carol get a job; Carol eventually meets Ted Haines Jr. and the two wind up getting married without informing his father. O'Malley tries to sell some of the songs he's written, while bringing some music to the parish by setting up a boys' choir that becomes quite successful. O'Malley does enough good work to make St. Dominic's a going concern again that the bishop decides to give him a parish fully of his own and bring in O'Dowd to work as the new "assistant" to Fr. Fitzgibbon. But there are still a few more twists along the way.

Having watched Going My Way again, I still don't particularly like it, although I don't know that I have quite as much disdain for it as I had in the past. That's in part because I realize now that one of the things the movie had going for it was being released in the middle of World War II, at a time when audiences on the homefront were in need of a movie like this to soothe their discomforts in an age when there was thoroughly stressful news of the war all around them.

However, I will also say that I still hold to my view that the Academy got things badly wrong in selecting Going My Way for the Oscars that it won. Alexander Knox should have been a runaway winner of Best Actor for Wilson, even more so if you think that Crosby and Fitzgerald might have split a few votes. It's certainly not the Best Picture of 1944; that honor probably from a hindsight/revisionist point of view would go to Double Indemnity. From the point of view of 1944, even a homefront picture like Since You Went Away is better than Going My Way. And I still believe that 1944 is the one year that Alfred Hitchcock was robbed of the Best Director award. He was nominated five times and the other four lost to some remarkable directorial work. But his portrayal of mob justice in Lifeboat and doing it on a deliberately limited set in the way he does is really quite remarkable; like Knox, he should have been a heavy favorite.

The other thing working against Going My Way is that it runs a little over two hours. Not only is it syrupy, it's a slow-moving syrup where you want everyone to get on with things. Still, Going My Way was wildly popular on its original relase, so maybe some viewers today will liek it too.