1944: Going My Way

“Schmaltz isn’t selling this season,” – Father O’Malley (Bing Crosby), Going My Way.

The poster is kind of misleading, as the lady featured on par with Bing Crosby had a relatively minor part, and despite the title, there’s no literally hitch hiking involved.

Going My Way is a sort of bland, gentle movie about the virtues of America that made it pretty obvious Oscar bait, especially for its time. Made deep in the heart of World War II (although the movie makes just one mention of the war), the clear idea of the movie is to show the U.S. as filled with small town virtues (even in New York City!) and to trumpet the strength and passion of the youth of the country and the tenacity of every good thinking American to overcome hardship.

Which isn’t to say Going My Way is all sunshine and chocolate. The movie starts with Father Chuck O’Malley (Bing Crosby) beginning a new assignment as the assistant at St. Dominic’s Parish, under the exceedingly crusty Father Fitzgibbon (Barry Fitzgerald). Fitzgibbon, who literally built St. Dominic, is old and set in his ways. As a result, Fitzgibbon has lost touch with the congregation he is supposed to attend and St. Dominic’s is in perilous position to be possessed by the bank (Bankers had retained their roles as easy villains, stemming from the Great Depression). O’Malley favors  a softer touch than Fitzgibbon’s fire and brimstone rhetoric. When a young runaway, Carol, is brought to the church, O’Malley tries to win her over with a singing lesson before Fitzgerald chases her off. O’Malley starts a boys’ choir to keep the neighborhood ruffians from stealing turkeys (it’s a simpler time). Fitzgibbon slowly starts to see O’Malley’s way of thinking as beneficial to the church. But can they save the church from financial ruin?

Going My Way has a certain charm about its sweetness. I think the movie’s too long, especially an unnecessary final twist where the church burns down and Fitzgibbon’s plans to rebuild (I guess this was to exemplify America’s can-do spirit in the face of setbacks). The film is sort of a musical, in that O’Malley – who is played by a beloved crooner, after all – routinely sings at pianos, but most of those instances, like when he gives Carol or the choir a lesson, bring the movie to a halt and feel really unnecessary.

I was legitimately surprised to find a still from the checkers scene on-line.

But there are other parts I found pretty interesting. The actors have a very naturalistic way of talking, often smirking and talking over each other, like real people do. Fitzgerald and Crosby have terrific chemistry together. In one scene, O’Malley beats Fitzgibbon in a game of checkers and Fitzgibbon just slowly slumps his head in defeat in a manner that’s really funny without being over-the-top.

A lot of the characters are also funny, although mostly unintentionally. The leader of the teenage ruffians, Tony Scaponi (already a funny name), talks like the ULTIMATE New Jersey caricature, pluralizing essentially every word out of his mouth (“Youse guys better be ready to sings real goods, ya hear?”) Also, there is a bonkers scene where he coerces one of the boys to sing with the choir by slapping him upwards of 15 times in short bursts of three to four a piece.

It is a catchy song.

The climatic singing of “Would You Like to Swing on a Star” also deserves mention for its awkwardness. Basically the boys are gathered around a piano with some adults. The adults all stand stiffly around the piano and occasionally the camera will zoom in one on of them as he or she stands there with a fake smile, unsure of what to do or how to act. It’s just bizarre.

I would also like to address the idea of censorship in these early movies. Film historians make a lot out of the Hayes Code, a 30s crackdown on immorality in cinema that neutered storytelling. However, a lot of these early Oscar movies still have a lot of morally questionable activities in them. For instance, Carol, the runaway, takes up with the banker’s son and is pretty clearly living in sin with him, although the actual particulars of their relationship are danced around. Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca, Rebecca in Rebecca, Joan Crawford in Grand Hotel ­­­­– all these movies have some pretty illicit happenings, even if they aren’t made especially explicit.

I have made a good deal of fun of Going My Way but it actually kind of grew on me. Like I said, it’s sort of bland and sappy, but Crosby and Fitzgerald (who both won Oscars for the movie), have real charisma together. The movie has a lot of laughs – some intentional, some not – and really isn’t as dull as some of the other “small town charm” films of the era like How Green Was My Valley. It’s not that there weren’t dark movies being made during the war – 1944 also saw the release of the noir classic Double Indemnity, which is about a woman who uses a man to murder her husband for the insurance payoff – but my guess is Hollywood was trying to showcase its positive side by rewarding the movie they thought best exemplified American values, certainly neither the first nor the last time the Oscars were about Hollywood trying to put on a certain façade regarding the industry.

Trivia: Because of the vagaries of early Oscar rules, Barry Fitzgerald was nominated for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for his role as Father Fitzgibbons, making him the only person to ever achieve such a feat. Oscar rules have such been rewritten that an actor can only be nominated for one of the two categories per film.

1943: Casablanca

Captain Renault: What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?

Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.

Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.

Rick: I was misinformed.

– Rick (Humphrey Bogart) and Captain Renault (Clause Rains) share a healthy quip, Casablanca

(For the record, the whole movie is quotable, I just wanted to go with something a little less well known than “Here’s looking at you kid.”)

What can be said about Casablanca? It is basically the perfect movie. It is filled with awesome people doing awesome things, coming up with pithy, perfect comebacks and rejoinders even in the midst of self-pity and drunken, self-loathing benders. A movie with characters so charismatic and engaging that we barely notice – if we notice at all – that the plot doesn’t actually make that much sense and turns on a totally ridiculous plot device. It is a story of love, sacrifice and redemption in a time of heroes.

At the height of World War II, Casablanca is a lawless no-man’s land populated by smugglers, thieves and sad escapees trying to get from Nazi Germany to a better life in America. The country is a quasi-neutral zone where refugees and criminals alike can escape. At the heart of the dangerous city is Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart in an iconic role) a cynical nightclub owner who proudly proclaims to “stick his neck out for nobody.” Bogart is a loner, but remains fiercely protective of his staff, notably piano player Sam and shares a witty repartee with the corrupt police Captain Renault (Clause Rains).

Rick comes into possession of Letters of Transit, documents that will allow the holders to leave Casablanca, no questions asked. At the same time, heroic Hungarian freedom fighter Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) and his wife Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) come to Casablanca. Laszlo is fleeing from the Nazis and desperately needs the letters of transit to get to safety. But Blaine, who claims to not care about either side in the war, was once in love with Ilsa and in fact became the bitter broken man he is now because she left him without explanation.

One of the great cinema romances – Rick and Ilsa

Casablanca’s plot turns on Bogey learning how to care about something other than himself and finding the hero he had buried away in himself (he used to be a gun-runner for “losing efforts”). The movie’s grand climax – a scene so iconic basically every line in it could end up in Bartlett’s Quotations – brings everything to a head in grand fashion.

There is so much to love about Casablanca. Its dialogue – from oft-repeated phrases like “Here’s looking at you kid” to “In all the gin joints in all the world, she had to walk into mine” – crackles with a skillful turn of phrase rarely seen. And Bogart owns the role, bringing a witty charm to all his wise-cracks, but also finding the wounded heart beneath the bitter exterior. The scene where Rick finally turns a corner – helping a young couple cheat at roulette so they can buy passports – is as rousing as the film’s actual climax, not just because we feel good for the couple but we’re so happy Rick has proven not to be a louse.

Although from a certain perspective, the movie’s real romance is Rick and Captain Renault.

The movie is also very unusual. Nothing of note really happens – and the film’s main conflict isn’t established – until about 25 minutes – or nearly ¼ of the way – through the movie. But the movie is all about establishing scene and character, taking time to really lay out Rick’s world-weary, loner attitude. Rick’s Café is an amazing setting, basically the Star Wars cantina populated solely by humans.

Humphrey Bogart as Rick. That is one cool cat!

And then there are the letters of transit. The movie hinges on these fantastical documents that for some reason even the Nazis – not known for following international rights or procedures – cannot overrule of simply ignore. Thinking about these letters for very long shows how ridiculous they are but it doesn’t really matter in the end. The story is about character and the conflict is not really heroes vs. Nazis. It’s a love triangle and man’s ability to learn to find goodness in himself.

Roger Ebert said Casablanca was his favorite movie and it’s not hard to see why. Every time I watch, the characters continue to pop out of the screen to captivate the audience. It is basically the perfect movie.

Casablanca Trivia: The lore surrounding Casablanca could fill several blog entries in its own right, but here’s a tidbit I like. The movie’s climatic scene takes place at an airport, but because of World War II, the movie studio couldn’t get an airplane. Thus they made a mini-scale model and surrounded it with little people to make the plane appear full size.