The first thing that I’m going to say about this film was that I found it to be very disappointing. Every once in a while I’ll come across a film that can never seem to close the deal, and this film was certainly an example of that. It was as though director Leo McCarey and writers Frank Cavett and Frank Butler were afraid to have bad things happen to their characters. They would set up potentially dramatic situations, but then they wouldn’t fully pay them off, and almost always gave their characters an easy way out. As a result, we’re left with a film that is disjointed and ends up dragging towards the end because they didn’t do a good enough job in creating a cohesive story. This is a film that has no spine, and the main character, Father O’Malley (played wonderfully by Bing Crosby) has little to do and very few opportunities to be heroic when he could have gone down as one of the great heroes in cinematic history.

Going My Way is filled with missed opportunities.

I think that the reason the film missed so many opportunities was that it wasn’t focused. The first thing we see is Father Fitzgibbon (Barry Fitzgerald) getting threatened with foreclosure by the banker Ted Haines Sr. (Gene Lockhart). Father O’Malley shows up a short time later and confesses to his friend Father O’Dowd that the bishop has sent him to this parish to take over and manage it properly since the aging Father Fitzgibbons seems to have lost the capacity to do so, having started this parish 45 years earlier. Right from the beginning, we’re set up to think that this church is in danger of being closed, and Father O’Malley’s goal as the hero of the story is going to be to save it.

Then Father O’Malley and the audience are introduced to a couple of troubled youths. They bring a turkey to the church for Father’s Fitzgibbons and O’Malley, but Father O’Malley discovers that they stole the turkey, and the boys, along with several other neighborhood boys are in danger of being sent to reform school. Father O’Malley then takes it upon himself to bring all of the boys into the church and form a boys’ choir. We think, this is great! Father O’Malley is going to figure out a way to use the boys’ choir to raise money and help save the church.” We are, however, mistaken.

But from there the story really just goes off the rails. A series of small problems keep cropping up and Father O’Malley continues to solve them, and there are few to no consequences for any of them. Every time it seems like something dramatic is about to happen, the problem is solved without anyone even breaking a sweat. The first act is spent developing an antagonistic relationship between Fathers O’Malley and Fitzgibbins, but it never reaches a dramatic level. Father Fitzgibbons tries to get the bishop to transfer Father O’Malley only to find out from the bishop that Father O’Malley will be his eventual replacement. Without telling anyone, Father Fitzgibbons leaves the church and wanders the street in the rain. Father O’Malley looks for him, but he’s eventually brought back to the church by the police, no worse for the wear. There are several other examples of these episodic types of problems that completely break up the flow of the story and we don’t really hear another word about the potential foreclosure until the third act, if you can really determine where the third act begins.

Father O’Malley later meets up with Genevieve Linden, an opera star and a woman with whom he was romantic in the past. He tells her about a song that he’s written, and she tells him that if he can get it published, then they might be able to get enough money for it to save the church. Father O’Malley creates an arrangement that includes the choir, and they perform it for a recording executive who passes on it because it’s a little too sentimental and schmaltzy. Once he’s left, Father O’Malley starts playing a different tune that he wrote to cheer everyone up. Hearing that tune from outside, the executive comes bounding in and offers to buy that tune, and the church is saved. No sooner are Fathers O’Malley and Fitzgibbons celebrating their success than does Father O’Dowd come running in to the seminary to tell them that the church has caught on fire and they watch as it burns to the ground. Father O’Malley tells Father Fitzgibbons not to worry, and that they will rebuild it.

There’s a little more to the story after that, but it’s the last bit that I want to take issue with. The previous paragraph should have been the crux of the entire story and it took about ten minutes to deal with. It seems as though the director and the writers felt like they had so many great ideas that they couldn’t choose which ideas to cut, so they used all of them. This is a film of subplots. That’s what I meant earlier when I said the film had no spine. There was not one over-arching story idea that took hold of the story in order to drive the action like there should have been. Then the film makers could have chosen the two, or maybe 3, best subplots in order to help establish character, set mood, and all of the other things that subplots are designed to do. Rather this story is a puddle of subplots that has created an episodic film that had no real climax, no dramatic arc and little drama at all. In fact, it felt like it ended very abruptly even though it’s over two hours long. The reason for that was because the plot was so disjointed so as to make it impossible to reach a crescendo.

Story-wise, this was not a great film.

The characters, at first glance seem to be the strength of the film, but even their development is flawed. Bing Crosby won Best Actor for his portrayal of Father O’Malley in Going My Way and he played the likable priest very well.  However, his character doesn’t change a whole lot as a character throughout the film, although he inspires change in those around him. Father Fitzgibbons goes through the most pronounced character change. He starts out the film as a closed-minded and curmudgeonly old man, but ends the film with new life and a new appreciation for those around him. However, even with that said.  There wasn’t a ton of organization in creating his character as well. His reactions to events early in the story were not terribly consistent, and he was a bit all over the place. He did, however, become a lot more focused by the end of the film. Also, Ted Haines Sr. has a nice character arc, but he’s such a minor character that it isn’t as impactful on the audience. It certainly wasn’t as impactful had Father O’Malley gone through some dramatic change. Perhaps if he hadn’t been confident going into the gig, but like Maria in The Sound of Music, his confidence grew as he gained more successes, then the story might have been more engaging, even with its episodic nature. But O’Malley does not go through that. He has few, if any flaws and he has no room at all to grow.

I do want to mention something else regarding the relationship between Father O’Malley and Father Fitzgibbons. As mentioned above, this should have been a much more antogonistic relationship, and it was set up to be that way. I spent the first few minutes of the film thinking that thematically this was going to be a changing of the guard story. Out with the old, the tired and the cynical and in with the new,  the energetic and the ambitious. But that is not what happened. Like everything else in this film, they glossed over the relationship. They left it shallow, just like the story and just like most of the characters. This is a shallow film.

I think what must have won the Oscar for Going My Way is the acting. As mentioned above, Bing Crosby won Best Actor that year and Barry Fitzgerald won Best Supporting Actor, and he was strangely enough also nominated for Best Actor for the same role. Indeed, the acting is very good in this film, and especially considering the acting of the time, the actors in this film did a very good job of creating characters that seemed like real human beings that live in the real world.

Again, this points to the earlier thought that I had where the film makers didn’t seem to want to make life hard on their characters. They liked their characters too much (or not enough) to put them in bad situations that they would have had to worked to get out of. All of this leads to the creation of a film that came up way short of great.

Did the Academy get it right?

No they did not. In fact, the Academy was wrong on several fronts that year. Going My Way also won awards for direction and writing and took home six of the nine Academy Awards for which it was nominated. As stated above, I am not a fan of either the directing or the writing in this film. Double Indemnity was nominated against Going My Way and is a far superior film in almost every way. Double Indemnity has a compelling story, riveting characters, and a masterfully written script. The acting might not be as good, although Barbara Stanwyck was nominated for Best Actress. Billy Wilder’s direction is far superior to what McCarey did in this picture, and the screenplay that Wilder and co-writer Raymond Chandler wrote was much better than what Cavett and Butler did for Going My Way. Indeed, history has borne that out as well, as Double Indemnity is ranked #29 on AFI’s list of the top 100 films of all time and Going My Way is not on the list at all. We’ve seen over the years that one film can gain all of the momentum going in to awards season and can take awards over other superior films, and that was certainly the case in 1944.