 |
 Bing Crosby is the "young" Father O'Malley and when he shows up at St.
Dominic's, "old" Father Fitzgibbon doesn't like him too much. The two priests
cannot agree with one another. Things start to change when O'Malley's "fresh
methods" win over the neighborhood's "toughest" kids. "The neighborhood becomes
closer as the church's meaning grows dearer to their souls." I have no idea
what that last sentence means. 1944, 127 minutes, DVD
If you fired up the wayback machine and headed back to 1944, you would see
that this movie was quite the happening thing. How so? It was nominated for 10
Academy Awards. It won seven including, best picture, best actor, best
director, best original script and best song. It also caused a change in the
Academy rules. Somehow Barry Fitzgerald (Father Fitzgibbon) was nominated for
both best actor and best supporting actor for the same role! He lost the best
actor Oscar to co-star Bing Crosby, but did pick up best supporting actor. Now,
you can be nominated in multiple categories, but not for the same role.
Director Leo McCarey also became the first person that year to win both the
directing and writing Oscars. McCarey made some of the funniest movies of that
era with fare including the Marx Brothers classic Duck Soup and one of Cary Grant's best films, The Awful Truth , but just to prove he had his off days he also helmed the awful Once Upon A Honeymoon . Going My Way is mainly a sappy feel good bit of piffle, but you do get a few laugh (or at
least smirk) out loud moments. Bing Crosby plays Father O'Something or other and you can tell right from the
get go that this isn't your great-grandfather's priest. He's heading over to
his new church for the first time and joins some of the neighborhood kids in a
game of stickball whereupon an errant pop fly (god, get on your horse Bing!)
goes through some dude's window. Bing goes over there and is real polite and
nice to the guy whose window was broken, but this guy's a complete butt and an
atheist. When this dude throws the ball across the street, Bing states, "he
even throws like an atheist" Many times while watching the Iowa Hawkeye
football team in 1999, I wondered if Randy Reiners was some kind of atheist.
Bing retrieves the ball which rolled under a truck and as he did so, a
streetsweeper comes by and soaks him! You know this was leading somewhere and
didn't have to wait long to see the payoff. He finally shows up at his new
church and meets the current priest, Father Fitzgibbon. So Fitzgibbon's waiting
for Bing and here he comes all decked out in a very unflattering grey St. Louis
Browns sweat suit! Father Fitzgibbon immediately takes a dislike to this new
age hippie priest.  A good portion of the movie is the tension that exists between this hotshot
priest with his fancy ideas and the old line priest who's been at the church
since the crucifixion. Bing sees potential problems in the neighborhood and
sets about fixing them. A lot of the neighborhood kids, who seem to auditioning
for a Bowery Boys movie, have been terrorizing the neighborhood. How, you may
ask? Well this was 1944, so it wasn't a bunch of pasty face lunatics in black
trenchcoats who watch Redemption DVDs while their moms are at work. See, these
kids were real ruffians because they played stickball and stole some turkeys
off of a truck. Where's McGruff when you need him? Bing knows they stole a
turkey, because he and Fitzgibbon ate the turkey after Fitzgibbon blundered
onto the kids and they played it like they were bringing it to him or
something. So Bing decides he just has to layeth the smacketh down on these
nogoodniks and he orders them...to a baseball game! Okay, I know you think
that's pretty heinous, but this Bing, he's a sadist! It's not just a baseball
game, its a doubleheader ! Yankees vs. Browns! See, Bing used to work out with them and so he can get
50 free passes to take every stinking twerp in the neighborhood to the game. This ballgame stuff was only part of his master plan...to form a boys' choir!
You see, Bing thinks that these kids have nothing to do but steal turkeys (it's
better than choking chickens) and that a boy's choir would really get everyone
on the right track. But these kids are toughened young thugs and they won't be
won over so easily. They look at him kind of funny in a "What you talkin' 'bout
Mr. B?" way then the immediately fall all over themselves to sing for this guy.
I guess we should all be glad that Bing only wanted to form that choir so the
kids would know the joy of singing, because they sure seem to practice in the
church basement an awful lot. Well, you can imagine how this all goes over with
Father O'Fogey. When those hooligans sing such disrespectful songs as "Three
Blind Mice" the old geezer thinks, "what in tarnation?" and immediately heads
off to see the bishop to tattle on this out of control rock and roll priest. He
comes back to the church after his meeting and finally figures out that the
bishop sent Bing to be in charge in a kind of "double-secret" way and that Bing
was to get the church back on its feet financially. Eventually these two priests take a shine to one another and somehow Bing uses
the boy's choir to rebuild the church after it burns down. But alas, Bing is
called upon by the bishop to perform his miracle working on another troubled
church and so we get a going away scene designed to jerk your tears (not better
than choking chickens). They even throw in Bing arranging for old Father
Fitzgibbon's 99 year old mother, who hasn't seen her baby boy in over 45 years,
to be flown in from her native Ireland ! I admit I was misting up, but I think
my contacts were bothering me by this time as we had travelled well past the
two hour mark on this affair. The movie will probably be a bit plodding for
today's audience and there is a completely pointless subplot about some young
couple that I'm still trying to figure out what it had to do with anything, but
Bing is an affable sort of guy (off-screen reputation notwithstanding), though
he doesn't sing as much as you might expect (certainly not as much as in Holiday Inn ). The simplistic portrayal of a variety of societal ills certainly dates this
movie, sometimes quite badly. I can see why wartime America ate this one up
with a spoon with its happy endings and feel good tendencies. It's well-made
golden age Hollywood corn.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
|
|
