GOING MY WAY: Blu-ray (Paramount, 1944) Shout! Select
Is there a more
unabashedly sentimental dramady than Going My Way (1944), director, Leo
McCarey’s lithe and lyrical, warm-hearted sing-a-long musical, starring Paramount’s
biggest star from this period - Bing Crosby (who won an Oscar as Father
O’Malley). In hindsight, Father O’Malley is a remarkably sophisticated Catholic
priest; his sphere of influence extending into the worlds of pop entertainment,
baseball and high opera. And…oh yes, McCarey’s little gem won gold statuettes
for Best Director and Best Picture too: small point of interest, I know, but
ones that long ago ought to have fast-tracked Going My Way for a Blu-ray
release. Incidentally, the other nominees of that year were Gaslight, Double
Indemnity, Since You Went Away, and, Darryl F. Zanuck’s political
magnum opus, Wilson (incidentally, and rather shamelessly, the only
movie still MIA in hi-def). And while one can sincerely debate Academy voting
members their sanity in affording this relatively ‘little’ movie its highest
honor ahead of such heavy hitters, no one should be consternating over the
effectiveness of either McCarey’s ability to tug at our heartstrings or Der
Bingle’s affable and inimitable charm as the big-hearted/brass tacks cleric who
can take on any situation with more than a bit of fun-filled finesse. Crosby
was, by 1944, one of the eminent pop-culture figures of the 20th
century; having transferred his talents from Vaudeville, as part of a swing
band ensemble to a chart-topping solo career on the radio and then, in the
movies. Crosby’s enduring legacy today, as one of the all-time best-selling
recording artists of his generation has likely obscured the virtues of his
acting talents; that, and a poisoned pen bio, of course - written after his
death, suggesting Crosby was a destructive and exacting task master at home who
all but contributed to the suicide of one of his sons. Ridiculous rubbish,
indeed!
Crosby’s Father
O'Malley is assigned by the Dioceses as an assistant to Father Timothy O'Dowd
(the irrepressible Frank McHugh), an intermediary of sorts to slowly ease an
aged Father Fitzgibbon (the unreservedly magnetic, Barry Fitzgerald) from his
parochial duties into his emeritus years. However, owing to Fitzgibbon’s feisty
refusal to depart on cue, he is being kept unaware that his days as a
practicing man of the cloth are numbered while O’Malley gingerly coaxes him
into his rocking chair. Going My Way is a delicious concoction of
merrymaking and music; Crosby given the lion’s share of the score to warble in
his one-off style. Crosby’s musical stealth cuts across many genres, from a
stirring rendition of Shubert’s much beloved (and even more re-purposed) Ave
Maria to the Oscar-winning hit parade favorite, ‘Swingin’ on a Star’
co-written by Tin Pan Alley favorites, Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke. In
some ways, Going My Way represents the culmination of Crosby’s
indentured contract services as Paramount’s most bankable star throughout the
thirties and forties. Like all of the musical talents eventually fed through this
gristmill – though particularly those shot out of a canon at Paramount –
Crosby’s appearances in movies up until Going My Way were relatively
undistinguished; merely a cavalcade, meant to pitch the latest hit parade tunes
heard on the radio, blended into a mélange of convivial plots, suspiciously
similar and loosely constructed as bridges between the singing. Even Holiday
Inn (1942), Crosby’s most sizable smash prior to Going My Way, is
little more than an excuse for Crosby (paired for the first time with Fred
Astaire) to zip through an assemblage of Irving Berlin standards, including his
biggest record of all time – White Christmas.
By 1944, Bing
Crosby had achieved unprecedented success in virtually every facet of then
available ‘mass media’ as a laid-back bass-baritone; one of the 20th century’s
most easily identifiable ‘crooners’. To date, Crosby has sold over a billion
records worldwide. In hindsight, his was a voice born for the microphone –
entering popular entertainment at precisely the same interval as the sound
recording innovation. Crosby led the
charge in pioneering a more intimate singing style, later to usher in the likes
of Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, Dick Haymes, and Dean Martin; his influence
distinctly felt, and looming large over not only the industry, but their
artistry. The word ‘prolific’ seems grossly inadequate to summarize Crosby’s
far-reaching success; his legacy Teflon-coated, though severely challenged, and
perhaps even slightly tarnished by a postmortem ‘tell all’ written by his son,
Gary, who claimed Crosby’s disciplinarian edicts bordered on regularly
administered ‘cruel and unusual’ punishments – both verbal and physical;
a claim, later refuted by Crosby’s younger son, Phillip, who admits Crosby was
strict in their upbringing, but never to the egregious levels outlined in
Gary’s memoir, ironically titled, Going My Own Way.
“My dad was not
the monster my lying brother said he was,” Phillip stated in a 1999 interview
in The Globe, “He was strict, but…never beat us black and blue, and my
brother Gary was a vicious, no-good liar for saying so…He wrote ‘Going My Own
Way’ out of greed... He knew it would generate a lot of publicity. My dad was
my hero. I loved him very much. He loved all of us too, including Gary. He was
a great father.” So too, should we point out that this account was
published in 1983, the height of a then insidiously popularized trend in
‘biographies’ expressly meant to topple great names in showbiz, and, featuring
puffed out accounts decidedly exaggerated from their personal lives and public
indiscretions. Following in the vein of Christina Crawford’s hatchet job on her
mother, Joan Crawford, ‘Mommie Dearest’ and B.D. Hyman’s wicked literary
assault on Bette Davis’ ‘My Mother’s Keeper’; these ‘stories’ – sold as
fact, and believed as truth in their own time, have since been regularly
contested by each star’s ‘other’ children who grew up in the same household as
the ‘authors’ of these poisoned pen memoirs.
To contextualize
the picture’s monumental success, Going My Way was the highest-grossing
movie of 1944; a year dotted by such legendary releases as Meet Me in St.
Louis, Cover Girl, Hail the Conquering Hero, Murder My Sweet, Thirty Seconds
Over Tokyo and Laura, to name but a handful of the iconic product
Hollywood was pumping out. By far, it is Crosby’s most plot-driven movie to
date; director, Leo McCarey creating ginger-peachy vignettes from the fabric of
wartime and slightly careworn Americana, in which either the centerpiece or
bookends of each scene is a Crosby song immediately followed by a transitional
‘fade to black’. “I only know I like my characters to walk in clouds,”
McCarey once pointed out, “I like a little bit of the fairy tale. As long as
I'm there behind the camera lens, I'll let somebody else photograph the
ugliness of the world.” Indeed, McCarey’s forte was begun in thirties'
screwball with irreverent classics like Duck Soup (1933) and The
Awful Truth (1937). But McCarey also proved adept at romantic melodramas,
his best known – 1958’s An Affair to Remember, actually a remake of his
own earlier masterpiece, Love Affair (1939).
Going My Way comes at the
height of Crosby’s meteoric fame in the movies; begun inauspiciously as part of
‘The Rhythm Boys’ – a specialty act, appearing as ‘Bing’ in Paramount’s
all-star spectacle and early talkie, King of Jazz (1930). By 1944,
Crosby had become one of the most beloved entertainers in the world, tirelessly
raising American G.I. morale through his breakneck live concert tours and
raising money for war bonds. His stamina during the forties is mind-boggling;
committed to making at least two or three movies a year, recording dozens of
songs, and, appearing on his own radio program for CBS. In 1948, Der Bingle (as
he was nicknamed) was even given the moniker ‘most admired man alive’
ahead of Pope Pius XII. So perhaps it is not so much of a stretch to discover
him here as the benevolent, if ever so slightly enterprising, Father Chuck
O’Malley. The image of the ‘perfect priest’ just seemed to fit everyone’s
opinion of Crosby then. Going My Way meanders through a series of
vignettes that are, in and of themselves, poignant, occasionally cloying, and
certainly quaint. These include the awkward circumstance by which Father
Fitzgibbon comes in possession of a stolen Thanksgiving turkey; Father
O’Malley’s reunion with old-time college buddy, Father Timothy; O’Malley’s
involvement in molding the singing career of a young teen, Carol James (Jean
Heather); and his coaching of the Boys Choir to help raise money for St.
Dominic's ailing repair fund.
In this latter
endeavor, Father O’Malley is greatly aided by another old friend, Genevieve
Linden (operatic sensation, Rise Stevens) who suggests a benefit concert at New
York's Metropolitan Opera. But it all seems for not when Fathers O’Malley and
Fitzgibbons return from the concert's triumph to discover their beloved
cathedral destroyed in a terrific blaze; the epic scope of this tragedy
crystalized in the intimate sad-eyed reflection caught in Barry Fitzgerald’s
careworn gaze and Crosby’s gentle understanding this old campaigner has just
witnessed his entire life’s work literally go up in smoke. As Fitzgibbon’s
faith is wounded and his health goes into steep decline, Father O'Malley
manages the unlikeliest of reunions; bringing Fitzgibbon's centenarian mother
over from Ireland, who comforts her son as only a mother’s love can. The
narrative structure of Going My Way is oft brought into question. And,
truthfully, it really only hints at a lot of threads it never entirely gets
around to fully stitching together before the final fade out. The picture’s
strength is therefore, and undeniably, its tear-jerking sentiment;
unapologetic, warm and fuzzy ‘feel good’ with Crosby’s clergy, a somewhat wily
puppet master, able to prevent the whole enterprise from sinking into rank
saccharine-infused treacle.
Going My Way’s screenplay by
Frank Butler and Frank Cavett is frequently interrupted by Crosby running
through a swath of pop songs – the best, still the deservedly Oscar-winning ‘Swingin’
on a Star’ O'Malley performs with an assist from St. Dominic’s Boys’ Choir
for Genevieve’s benefit. A bouncy tune, it proves the centerpiece of an
otherwise largely forgettable, if eclectic score, borrowing from operatic arias
interpolated with a few standards, like the perennial Christmas hymn, Silent
Night, Holy Night and 1914’s Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral (a.k.a. The
Irish Lullaby; one of Crosby’s biggest radio hits), capped off by the Van
Heusen/Burke ballad, The Day After Tomorrow. Going My Way was
released at the height of WWII and it is perhaps saying much of the general
public’s need for sentiment and salvation that it became the highest-grossing
movie of the year – nominated for a record 10 Academy Awards (winning an
astounding 7: for Best Original Song ‘Swingin’ on a Star’; Best Director
and Original Story – both awards going to Leo McCarey, Best Screenplay, Best
Supporting Actor – Barry Fitzgerald, Best Actor – Bing Crosby and the most
coveted of them all – Best Picture).
Today’s audiences have become far to jaded to truly appreciate the
tenderness in Going My Way, and indeed, in spots the picture appears to
suffer from a marginal unnecessarily maudlin strain. Personally, I have always
found the McCarey/Crosby follow-up, The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945 and
oft erroneously referenced as a sequel) as a more cohesive picture on the
whole; McCarey’s pacing and direction infinitely tighter. In hindsight, Going
My Way also marked the first time Crosby donned the cleric’s collar; again,
in Bells (for which he was subsequently Oscar-nominated for
playing the same part - again as Best Actor) and, a decade later, in the now
all but forgotten Fox musical, Say One For Me (1959) where he croons the
sublime and underrated, ‘The Spirit of Christmas’.
The curmudgeonly
camaraderie between Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald in Going My Way is quite
palpable and arguably, the picture’s best-selling feature, then as now;
Fitzgerald, carrying more than a bit of the Irish blarney stone wit and wiles,
thus to endear him to movie audiences herein and elsewhere in the cinema
firmament. Aside: I get an immediate warm and fuzzy ‘feel good’ recalling him
as Michaleen Oge Flynn; the sage buggy driver in John Ford’s masterpiece, The
Quiet Man (1952). The rest of the cast in Going My Way slightly
overplay their hand. Frank McHugh especially, is gregarious to distraction, too
much ham and not enough cabbage to give his performance the necessary gutsy
good-time resolve it ought to possess. Rise Stevens is mere – if absolutely
stunning – window-dressing, showcased in several operatic sequences that bring
the already methodical pacing to a screeching halt. Yet, in the final analysis,
the awkwardness in these misfires takes a backseat to McCarey’s ample gifts as
a true – and today, sadly set aside – visual artist. In hindsight, Going My
Way may not be the ‘best’ picture of 1944, but it remains one hell
of a top-flight entertainment, guaranteed to enrich the soul.
And now, comes
Shout! Select’s Blu-ray reincarnation of Going My Way. The movie, under
Universal Home Video’s custodianship, has finally been allowed to surface in
hi-def. All I can say is - about time! Alas, as with a lot of Uni’s product
more recently to be coming down the pike via third-party distributors, Going
My Way’s B&W image is more brightly represented here than on past DVD
releases. This allows fine details previously lost in ‘darker’ video imaging to
emerge. There is also more information on all four sides. But I find it
difficult to label this as a new remaster, as age-related dirt and scratches –
moderate, at best – are nevertheless still present as they were on the DVD. There is also a persistent and
heavier-than-usual amount of film grain, appearing digitally harsh at times
rather than indigenous to its source. Due to the brighter image, the gray scale
can occasionally appear less refined, with contrast looking intermittently
anemic and no real deeply saturated black levels. Image stabilization has not
been applied either. So, we get flicker and light bleeding around the edges and
an ever so slight instability, gate weave and wobble. Disappointing, actually!
Not even the basics have been applied. Truly, a cut-rate effort at best.
The DTS mono
audio sounds just fine. Extras, this time, are plentiful. Universal only
deigned to give us a very brief introduction by TCM’s host, the late Robert
Osborne and a theatrical trailer. We lose Osborne on this Blu, but gain a pair
of short subjects – Road to Home, and, All-star Bond Rally, plus,
footage of Crosby accepting his Oscar from Gary Cooper. There’s also a radio
adaptation, an Edward R. Murrow interview with Crosby, an appearance by Crosby
on Philco Playhouse, a re-issue trailer, stills and press and promo. Bottom
line: Going My Way from Shout! is yet another example of Uni doing the
bare-bones minimum to release its deep catalog in hi-def. Undervaluing their
archival past seems to be a habit with this studio – one, I sincerely wish some
infusion of sanity and new management there would break! This Blu is certainly ‘an
improvement’ over the DVD release. Aside: there was nowhere to go from that
atrocious effort but up! But is this Blu really the ‘standard bearer’? ‘Better
than’, just ‘not as good as’…? Judge and buy accordingly.
FILM RATING (out
of 5 - 5 being the best)
4.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
3
EXTRAS
3.5
Comments