Going My Way: Leo McCarey

Jean Renoir once said that director Leo McCarey "understood people better than any other Hollywood director." There is much truth in that. Throughout his distinguished career, McCarey proved himself to be a master of human drama. Only a director with an unparalleled eye for human behavior could elevate such films as Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) and The Awful Truth (1937) to greatness. And yet his film Going My Way, the 1944 winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, is almost too concerned for human drama. Here is a film that is undeniably sweet yet nearly unforgivably indulgent. Clocking in at a merciless 130 minutes, the film overstays its welcome and fails to leave an impact beyond momentary melancholy. Going My Way follows young priest Father "Chuck" O'Malley (Bing Crosby) as he is assigned to a struggling New York City parish under the rule of the well-intentioned but ultimately ineffectual Father Fitzgibbon (Barry Fitzgerald). Father O'Malley helps revitalize the parish by connecting with the local youth and forming a boy's choir. There are scattered subplots throughout: O'Malley's life before he accepted the Call, a stolen turkey, a local gossip, a runaway who starts living in sin with the son of the church's mortgage-holder, Fitzgibbon's desire to see his mother living in Ireland, his semi-forced retirement, efforts to raise money for the church through a choir performance at the Metropolitan, and so on and so forth. While individually these sequences are warm and touching, they fail to congeal into a cohesive whole. There's a scene late in the film when the church accidentally burns down. It is treated as a massive narrative climax, but it does little to resonate with the audience because McCarey has spent so much time faffing about with trivial goings-on. Some might feel tempted to view Going My Way as a forerunner of the more naturalistic and measured narrative techniques that would arise in the 1950s in Europe. But McCarey's aim here is too sentimentalized, too schmaltzy. It is too clearly the product of a pleasant fiction. It doesn't help that the film's many songs (with the exception of a wonderful yet unnecessary operatic interlude) have aged like milk instead of fine wine.

6/10