#TCM Movie: Going My Way (1944)

By 1943, Leo McCarey was at the climax of his career. He had won for Best Director in 1937 for "The Awful Truth" and each film up until the early '40s had been nominated. The riding high director came to Paramount with an idea with the working title "The Padre" that would ended up becoming "Going My Way." "The story he told the studio heads [...] bore no resemblance whatever to the story he finally shot. But he made the tale so absorbing that they had to go for it." (Laurel and Hardy: A Bio-bibliography. Gehring, Wes D.. 1990) Even Bing Crosby accounted that McCarey made up "probably 75 per cent of each day's shooting" the day of. "He would immediately go to the piano [when he came on set in the morning] and play some ragtime for an hour or two, while he thought up a few scenes." (Leo McCarey * Great Director profile * Senses of Cinema)

Filming started August 16, 1943 and ran until October 22 shooting in multiple locations outside of Paramount Studios. St. Monica's Catholic Church posed as Father Fitzgibbon's St. Dominic's Church and Crosby's usual haunt of the Lakeside Golf Club was also featured as an exterior. The Hollywood Reporter reported that footage of the St. Louis's Planter's hotel and Duffy's restaurant were retained for possible use and that McCarey shot eighty-four-year old Apache Joe Mangum as "Geronimo" for a scene at the St. Louis World Fair with plans to feature Father O'Malley's hometown. It was also reported that composers Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen worked on a two-act operetta and a scene between "street gamin and priest" in a New York hospital introducing penicillin was planned on. All of these three scenes were not included in the finished film. Paramount was also unable to get European copyright clearance for Georges Bizet's opera Carmen so they shot an additional sequence from Smetana's "The Bartered Bride" to replace what was already in the script or on McCarey's daily to-do list. 

"Going My Way" premiered on May 3rd, 1944 at the Palace. Paramount arranged for an April 27, 1944 premiere, according to a Hollywood Reporter article, "for the simultaneous world-wide showing to the troops in combat areas made by the Army Pictorial Service from Alaska to Italy and from England to the jungles of Burma..." A total of 65 prints were distributed but Paramount didn't just stop there with their philanthropy. The Hollywood premiere on August 16, 1944 helped donate $10,500 proceeds for the House of Nazareth orphanage. By September, the film earned over $7,000,000 in gross revenue with a total of $10,000,000 in foreign and became Paramount's largest grossing film to date. 

Bosley Crowther at The New York Times called "Going My Way" "rich, warm and human to the core. [...] It is the story of new versus old customs, a traditional age versus youth. And it is a story of human relations in a simple, sentimental, honest vein." Variety did have one criticism that "the overlong 126 minutes contain many episodes which could be deleted for more compactness," but the "picture is a warm human drama studded liberally with bright episodes and excellent characterizations accentuated by fine direction of Leo Carey. Intimate scenes between Crosby and Fitzgerald dominate throughout, with both providing slick characterizations." 

Going My Way will air on TCM on Sunday, December 22 at 7:00 CST/8:00 EST