Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. Going My Way is the seventeenth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. To hear people talk about the Academy today, you might have this picture of a stodgy organization where voters gather in smoke filled rooms to anoint the most pretentious movie of the year. This reputation intensifies the further back in Oscars history you go. It also could not be farther from the truth. Oscars history is littered with terrible movies telling incredibly dated stories, but it is also brimming with delightful, four quadrant spectacles. Point and case is the Leo McCarey directed, Bing Crosby vehicle Going My Way. If ever there was an organization that earned its reputation for stodgy affairs and smoke filled rooms, it would be the Catholic Church. For this very reason, St. Dominic’s Catholic Church in New York City finds itself in a bad way. Once an institution in the Big Apple, the dwindling parish is struggling to keep up on their mortgage. Father Fitzgibbon (Barry Fitzgerald) built the church himself 45 years ago — 46 in October — but the old priest is thoroughly failing to connect with the community he built his church to serve. In a last ditch effort to save St. Dominic’s the bishop sends the progressive young Father O’Malley (Crosby) to right the ship. If we’ve learned anything from Jude Law’s Young Pope or Whoopi Goldberg’s Sister Mary Clarence, it is that nothing breaks up the monotony of Catholicism quite like a young, musically inclined clergy person. Crosby’s O’Malley may just be the blueprint of them all. His mission is something of a tightrope; restoring St. Dominic’s to its former glory without letting Father Fitzgibbon know that his church is functionally being taken from him. Though they clash early and often, O’Malley is able to bring together and truly help the community. With any overtly religious film there always exists some skepticism that the denominational message might overwhelm the actual story or propulsion of the movie. With Going My Way, we see almost the opposite. Father O’Malley is as interested in writing music as sermons. If more Catholic priests had Bing Crosby’s voice they probably would be too. St Dominic’s and the Church become less a function of message, instead serving as a setting for Bing Crosby croon and charm the locals. Speaking of theme, there is not much depth to Going My Way in the way that there had been for the handful of winners that preceded it. Still, what it lacks in depth it makes up for in entertainment value and blunt emotionality. Crosby and Fitzgerald play well off of each other in both friendship and rivalry, providing plenty of laughs and, in the finale, a few tears. Interestingly, the success of Going My Way led to a direct sequel, the wildly successful The Bells of St. Mary’s, again proving that the Oscars has always had some taste for the commercial and crowd pleasing. Maybe the same cannot be said for Catholicism but Father O’Malley gives it his best shot. What we’re left with is a perfectly delightful, if somewhat forgettable, Best Picture from one of the day’s biggest stars. 7/10
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