Not Going My Way

“Schmaltz isn’t selling this season.” So declares Father O’Dowd to Father O’Malley in Going My Way, the movie that won the Best Motion Picture Oscar in 1945. But apparently schmaltz was selling that season because this piece of excessively sentimental mash was nominated for ten Oscars - and won seven.

Bing Crosby plays Father O’Malley, a change agent sent to a church in financial trouble. He doesn’t want the old priest (Barry Fitzgerald), who's been there for forty-five years, to feel bad, so without hurting the old man’s feelings, O'Malley does a fundraiser involving songs he’s written and hopes to sell. Along the way he turns a bunch of hooligans into choir angels and also prevents a jazz-singing woman from becoming a lady of the night.

The movie was expected to sweep the Academy Awards that year and it did. It also held the record for above-the-line wins until 2022 when Everything Everywhere All at Once tied its six above-the-line wins. In the 1945 Best Motion Picture category, GMW beat out Double Indemnity and Gaslight, both far better flicks.

The writing in Going My Way simply cannot hold a candle to Gaslight (no pun intended) but both scripts were in the Oscar running that year. I think audiences and the Academy were gaslighted into believing Going My Way was a superior movie to its Best Pic competitors, including Meet Me in St Louis and Laura.

And so, GMW took the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. Its treacly storylines were carried out with devotion by El Bingo and his merry band of bad-boys-cum-singing-angels, a would-be prostitute and a real life opera star (Risë Stevens). At one hundred and twenty-six minutes, it’s too long, and much of that time is spent on blasé songs.

The tune that won Best Original Song that year, Swinging on a Star, seems like a pleasant enough ditty as crooned by Father O'Malley. I love its opening: “Would you like to swing on a star?/Carry moonbeams home in jar”. Why, yes I would! But I also love my animal friends - they are smart and aware, and these lyrics are not:

“A mule is animal with long funny ears…he’s just plain stupid with a stubborn streak/and by the way, if you hate to go to school/You may grow up to be a mule.” And this: “A pig is an animal with dirt on his face/His shoes are a terrible disgrace/He has no manners when he eats his food/He’s fat and lazy and extremely rude/but if you don’t care a fig/you may grow up to be a pig.”

Composer Jimmy Van Heusen was at Bing’s for dinner one night when he heard the crooner/actor tell one of his sons: “If you don't go to school, you may grow up to be a mule.” Later at home, Jimmy called his lyricist, Johnny Burke, and the rest is history.

Did Bing sing this to his boys at bedtime? If you know the tragedies that befell some of his sons (he had six), then maybe the idea of this tune sung as a lullaby makes you recoil a little. His eldest, Gary, published a memoir in 1989 titled Going My Own Way. In it, he details his own alcoholism, as well as the emotional and physical abuse that Bing heaped on his kids. His claims of abuse have been both confirmed and contested by other family members.

In one GMW scene, Bing dismisses pop music of the day as "voffala" - a made up word meant as a put-down to modern music and jazz. In real life Bing loved to swing (he was good friends with Louis Armstrong) but Father O’Malley finds it sinful. This voffala dig is lobbed at a young woman who wants to sing snappy tunes, and for this reason and because she's a runaway, the good father fears she will most certainly fall into a life of ill-repute. Why, she could even turn out to be like Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity: rotten to the core (but infinitely more watchable).

While the movie was silver screen comfort food being fed to an audience disillusioned by the ongoing travails of WW2, the actual food in this flick goes mostly uneaten. I have a thing about wasted food in films - I've even started a Vocal series about this phenomenon, titled Ya Gonna Eat That? (it's a bit like unrequited love). And I have a bone to pick (no pun intended) with GMW's turkey dinner scene.

Bing Crosby has a couple of turkey dinners that he doesn’t eat in his movies - in Holiday Inn (1942) he’s too heartsick to tuck into the bird or the mashed potatoes and peas with gravy. But in Going My Way it’s just that he has too many lines to say. So he spends the whole time cutting the meat on his plate into tiny pieces; microscopic pieces, in fact. Barry Fitzgerald (as Father Fitzgibbon) is his sounding board, so Barry gets to eat a big turkey leg while Bing bestows wisdom.

For his performance, turkey leg and all, Fitzgerald was nominated in both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor categories. He won for Supporting and Crosby won Best Actor. The Academy had to change some rules after that: no more double noms for one role.

I still see this movie being lauded and loved to this day. Perhaps it's because, just as when it was released, there's a war (wars) going on and life often seems eternally grim. But the solutions to the problems on tap in GMW are hotdogs, baseball and songs. I admit that these things can help, but they, like the flick itself, can also act as opiates, dulling our senses to real solutions to problems that need to be reframed, not regurgitated in repeat viewings of sappy movies like Going My Way.

Palette cleanser: Watch Gaslight or Double Indemnity or Laura. They're so excellent. And my vote for Best Original Song from the list of 1945 noms: The Trolley Song, as sung by Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis. Belt it out while you're coming up with new solutions to reframed problems. Or would you rather be a pig?

Thanks for reading!