17. Going My Way (1944)

Plot Intro

In the dodgy end of New York City, youthful, kindly, progressive Father Chuck O’Malley (Bing Crosby), becomes a priest at the financially failing St Dominic’s Church. Unfortunately, the current elderly pastor, Father Fitzgibbon (Barry Fitzgerald) leads an extremely conventional, inactive lifestyle. These two very different priests clash, but must band together to help the church as the CEO of a loan company starts closing in on them for mortgage repayments, and threatens closure…

Paul says...

Going My Way does for the Catholic church what You Can’t Take It With You did for capitalism and big business. It takes the stagnating, pompous traditionalism of the long-standing institutions and thoughts, and introduces it to the humane, community-loving innocence of the young. I liked Take It With You despite its sugariness, so I had relatively high hopes for Going My Way.

Unfortunately, it’s excruciating. It takes saccharine to a whole new level. Humanity, in this film’s deluded universe, has a permanently sunny disposition and can change from bad to good with ease. All of the characters one might construe as villainous have impossibly quick changes of character- and none of them are particularly villainous to begin with. The avaricious head of the loan company is really just a mild-mannered business man doing his job; the street kids that O’Malley employs for the choir are far from criminal (they’re very eloquent, their worst crime is nicking a turkey, and they have an unbelievable penchant for singing Ave Maria- realistically, these kids would have flick knives and black eyes); and Jean Heather’s character, who is introduced as a bit of a floozy who has run away from her parents, turns out to be as rebellious as a Jonas Brother. Her ambition in life is not to be a housewife but to be a singer. Good heavens, where are my smelling salts?! 

All of these storylines are tied up with cloying ease, as if the writers felt their audience couldn’t possibly handle anything beyond the most tame of tales. Grimm’s fairy tales feel like a Saw movie in comparison. As a result, the film has no dramatic drive or suspense to keep its audience wondering how any issue that arises can be resolved. Sister Act covers  similar territory later, but with more humour, less solemnity, and an intention to embrace silliness. O’Malley bemoans the church’s seriousness and lack of fun, but Bing Crosby’s hardly Whoopi Goldberg when he performs.

Both Crosby and Fitzgibbon received Oscars for their roles. In fact, Fitzgibbon was nominated for Best Actor AND Supporting Actor for this role (the only time this has happened), and won the latter. I fail to see why. For an actor who had such a successful and extensive career, Crosby, to me, seemed held back and lacking in liveliness, and more interested in showing off his singing voice. Fitzgibbon mumbles horrendously and hobbles about with such a ridiculous voice that he reminded me of Golem in Lord of the Rings. Both were great actors of their day but neither captivated me here.

I’m condemning Going My Way as the worst film we’ve seen so far on this Oscars project. It’s boring, overly tame and sickly sweet. I suppose audiences took solace in its sugariness after the intensity of Mrs Miniver and Casablanca but, to me, it was nauseating.

Highlight

OK, I quite enjoyed the gossipy neighbour, Mrs Quimp. She is hashtag life goals.

Lowlight

The incongruous way the songs were shoved into the story. And none of them have aged well.

Mark

1/10

Doug says...

Paul’s pretty much covered it all this week. I regret marking Casablanca so lowly this week because the bar for terrible films has been revealed to be a whole lot lower than previously thought. I do slightly disagree in it being the worst film we’ve seen yet, because nothing has quite beaten the miserable depths of A Broadway Melody yet. 

However, it is shockingly bad. This is a film, just to remind us all, that came out three years after Citizen Kaine. Yet for the style of editing, the humourless writing and the over the top, unsubstantial performances - we might be back in the 1910s again. There’s even a jump-cut where the editor has been too over-hasty in gluing the film together, something we haven’t seen for about ten films. The only way this sentimental piece of frippery won all the Oscars it did was either bribery or there were actually no other films produced this year. 

The storyline (or what there is) is a watery Sister Act, only without the wit, pizzaz, cracking songs, or Whoopi. A young priest turns up to turn around a failing church, ropes in the local tearaways who all luckily have perfect voices and sings some dire faux-operatic songs. The title song ‘Going My Way’ is an ugly tune with some vague lyrics about ‘a basket of wishes’ or some such rubbish. It’s just dreadful. 

One of my main problems with this film, apart from it being just a waste of film reel, is that there are many ‘comic’ moments, all of which fall entirely flat because the cast have absolutely no comic timing. Jokes that might have raised a chuckle become tragically awkward. There’s no heart to this piece, to the extent that the copywriters who have written the blurb on the back of the DVD have retreated into writing vague schmaltzy words: ‘the neighbourhood becomes closer as the church’s meaning grows dearer to their souls’. No one has a clue what’s going on in this film. 

Looking at it from the perspective of audiences’ at the time - and herein lies the possible clue of how the film took so many Oscars - we are now in the final years of the war, in which there has been a terrible blitz and many lives lost. Everyone will be in need of a little escapism, and a chance to breathe, away from the horrors and misery of the everyday reality. So in a way, I get why a saccharine-drenched film with minimal plot and some deeply forgettable songs appealed to the long-suffering audiences of wartime cinema. It’s just not something that has lasted - even an iota - to the present day.

   

Highlight

Bing Crosby has a lovely voice. Apparently this voice was enough to win him ‘Best Actor’, because his acting skills certainly didn’t do anything. 

Lowlight

Literally everything. But if I had to pick a specific thing, I’d say Jean Heather as a demented 18 year old who becomes a housewife and delights in fetching her husband’s hat is a pretty poor blow to the feminist movement. Not to mention a dire acting performance. 

Mark

1/10 (the mark is solely for Bing’s voice)

16. Casablanca (1943)

Casablanca Plot Intro

Casablanca, Morocco, the early ’40s. With France occupied and most of Europe in uproar, refugees from all over flock to Casablanca where they use wits, bribery and luck to gain exit visas for a new, free life in America. Within this chaos is Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), a bar owner who wants to keep his head down and stay out of dangerous politics. But his life is changed when an old flame of his, Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), arrives in Casablanca with her husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). Laszlo is wanted by the Nazis so the couple are desperate to leave- and Rick becomes their only salvation. With old feelings between Rick and Ilsa re-emerging, however, Rick must now make a choice. Will he help his beloved Ilsa to leave his life forever, or keep her within the suppressive confines of Casablanca?

Paul says...

Casablanca is not just a popular film. It has that enviable “icon” status that is shared with Gone With the Wind. The American Film Institute names it as the third greatest film of all time, surpassed only by Citizen Kane and The Godfather. It’s part of movie royalty, with lines and scenes that have been satirised, imitated and referenced by The Simpsons, Family Guy, Red Dwarf and even, to name an obscure reference, one of the Discworld computer games. In other words, Casablanca is a Big Deal.

But, on my first viewing when I was in my mid-teens, I found it dull and confusing. I spotted all the famous lines which, like the shower scene in Psycho, are so expected that they’ve lost their power. I developed a disliking for Humphrey Bogart who pretty much plays the same detached, moody loner in all the other films I’ve seen of him, I was disappointed by how small-scale the film is (it’s mostly set in Rick’s cafe) and I found the final climactic 20 minutes too convoluted to follow (a lot happens in a short space of time).

But this repeated viewing gave me a more positive perspective, having now learnt more about the war, about unlikeable, complex characters in fiction, and gained an appreciation for films of this era. It’s refreshingly dark. How Green Was My Valley was sweet, homely and domestic. Mrs Miniver was inspiring and rose-tinted. But Casablanca is unafraid to show the corruption and unpleasantness of humanity. I loved all the side-characters who are desperately trying to escape or survive in their own way (such as a French floozy named Yvonne, and a young Bulgarian couple who have run out of money) and I liked speculating about where they were from and where they would end up. 

I also gained more understanding of the three major players in the central love triangle. Laszlo is the conventional hero- handsome, righteous, bellicose and courageous. Rick is the polar opposite- cynical, acerbic, ostensibly indifferent but loyal to his friends. And I identified much more with Ilsa, who is torn between two men she adores for different reasons, but must choose one to run away with. Should she choose the rebel or the survivor? Whom would YOU choose? 

What marks Casablanca down for me is that I was nowhere near as emotionally captivated as I was with the Welsh miners or Scarlett O’Hara in previous films. There are the classic, oft-repeated lines, but the film is also dotted with lines like, “Is that cannon fire, or is it my heart pounding?”, which would make the writers of Dynasty wince. I was interested to see how the main characters fare, and in the motivations and loyalties of some of the more ambiguous characters (Claude Raines’ measured performance as Captain Renault is an excellent example of untrustworthy meets likeable). But interesting is not enough for 10 out of 10- I want to be devastated and inspired but I was neither of those things.

For me, Casablanca is a fascinating insight into a side of the war that is often unexplored, and I enjoyed the way in which so many characters and storylines are tightly held together under a small-scale setting, but it’s not powerful enough for me to place it in my list of favourites.

Highlight

The famous Marseillaise scene, in which the entire cafe out-sing a group of German commanders. Imagine watching THAT in 1943 after a wearying 4 years of warfare.

Lowlight

The scenes between Bogart and Bergman alone sometimes drag. I found them full of saccharine dialogue that didn’t advance the story.

Mark

7/10 (up from a 4/10 when I last watched it) 

Doug says...

My mother loves this film. She quotes the lines, hums the tunes and does wistful sighs when you talk about Humphrey Bogart. So when I first sat down to watch it with her a few years ago, I expected great things, and was fairly disappointed. I found it dull, dragging, and very much like a patchwork of great lines all stitched together. However, since then I have grown up a fair bit, have gained a knowledge of the context of this film, and was prepared to re-approach it with a more adult perspective. 

It is somewhat surprising then to say that my opinion of this film has actually sunk further still. Plot-wise, very little happens. Character-wise, very little happens. And all of the female characters - particularly Ingrid Bergman - have nothing to do whatsoever. Bergman’s character has absolutely no agency bar protecting her big strong revolutionary husband. Bogart’s character does very little until the very end - and I’m particularly biased against the ‘masculine’ style of acting we’re seeing a lot in this period (namely just saying your lines while looking like you’ve had full-face botox). It’s just a bit dull. 

In fact I found it comparable to a far greater film - Cabaret - which has the similar situation of a lot of people trying to carry on as normal - going to bars and clubs - while secretly trying to escape the Nazi threat of the time. Cabaret likewise has a moment where people singing overpower the situation - only it’s more subversive as the young handsome Nazis sing Tomorrow Belongs To Me and everyone begins to reluctantly, fervently, join in. But Cabaret has characters you care about and feels more real. This on the other hand ends up feeling a bit half-finished. There’s no great story, there’s some atmosphere but nothing is really done with it. 

What’s surprising about this film is that the screenplay is generally considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, ever written. Whereas I feel it’s a piece very much of its time, and gathering dust rapidly. I can imagine that, being produced in the heart of WWII, it would have resonated with the watching audience far more and inspired them. The lines themselves could be great - but they’re all delivered at rattle-fast pace and without any deeper thought, so that they have only gathered importance and sincerity with the repetition and spoofs on other shows. Coming back to the source, I was left rather uninspired. 

   

Highlight

The line ‘we’ll always have Paris’ is useful when saying goodbye to friends for the weekend, so I’m very grateful it was written, even if it was delivered with somewhat-underwhelming gusto. 

Lowlight

It’s a slow film with potentially great lines, that doesn’t deliver the goods. Also Ingrid Bergman has such a lack of any personality or action here that she could be successfully replaced with a hatstand, and the film wouldn’t differ. 

Mark

3.5/10  

15. Mrs Miniver (1942)

Today's post is dedicated to Paul's Auntie Angela and her new husband Colin whose wedding we attended earlier today!

Plot Intro

Kay Miniver (Greer Garson) lives her idyllic lifestyle with her husband, Clem (Walter Pidgeon), her grown-up son Vin (Richard Ney) and her two smaller children. She spends her time bantering with the servants and supporting train station conductors in flower shows- she’s awfully nice. Then, war hits! Vin goes off to serve, leaving his fiance (Teresa Wright), Clem gets involved in Dunkirk and Kay ends up performing acts of heroism that she never knew she could achieve. 

Doug says...

Mrs Miniver is an interesting film in our overall catalogue. On the one hand it’s a simple patriotism-inducing effort, detailing the Minivers’ life in World War II and how they deal with bombing raids, death and chaos. On the other hand it’s a hugely important piece of social propaganda. The director William Wyler openly admitted he created it in order to encourage the US to join the war, showing the plight of ordinary plucky Britons thrown headfirst into fighting for their country. 

For me it bordered a little on the ridiculous. At one point Mrs Miniver (Greer Garson, doing a sterling job of turning trite lines into something more powerful) captures a German parachutist who delivers a monologue in her kitchen about how Germany will crush everyone without mercy. Famously the film ends with a vicar giving a huge speech about how this is everyone’s war, delivered from a pulpit in a bombed-out church. This speech was written the night before by the actor who gave it (Henry Wilcoxon), and was so well received that it was later printed in Time magazine and endorsed by the US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As a catalyst for the US’s involvement in WWII, it seems to have been substantially influential. 

But where the film succeeds dramatically for me is in the smaller details. Wyler later said that he had romanticised the war too much and not gone far enough in showing the horrors of it. But I think he does himself down a little - in one scene Mr and Mrs Miniver are spending the evening with their two youngest children and family cat in their Anderson shelter (a rough bomb shelter in the garden). It’s all pleasant and they’re reading Alice in Wonderland, until the bombs begin to fall and you really do get a sense - more than any other war film we’ve seen so far - that this is a terrifying situation to be in. 

There’s a love story too between the Minivers’ eldest son and the granddaughter of the local aristocracy which is sweet enough and very well acted (although the real gossip is that Greer Garson married the actor who played this son shortly after the film ended. It did not last). But apart from that, it’s a bit of an obvious film - lots of mentions about roses (a symbol of England) not dying and staying strong. And on top of it all, there’s Mrs Miniver herself wandering about and being brave and full of fortitude etc. While Churchill himself said this film did more for the war effort than a flotilla of destroyers, it hasn’t necessarily lasted well. Written entirely for the mid-war audience of the time, this isn’t a film with an eye on how it will fare in future decades. But why should it be? It clearly achieved its purpose of uplifting and moving the audience for whom it was written. And that is - one could argue - the entire point of cinema. 

Highlight 

The scene in the bomb shelter and another scene when Mrs Miniver drives a car through a bombing attack are excellently done in giving a flavour of how terrifying these day-to-day situations would have been for ordinary citizens during the war. 

Lowlight

The German Parachutist and his monologue proving how ‘evil’ the Germans are was far too on-the-nose for me. It felt as if the film had tipped from realism into spoof, to its own detriment. 

Fun Fact!

Mrs Miniver was so successful that they made a sequel in the ‘50s, in which Kay Miniver has an affair with someone and then dies. I’d say spoiler alert but the chances of any readers watching this are minimal. 

Mark 

5.5/10

Paul says...

Having read a few reviews about it, we had to go into Mrs Miniver with a sense of humour- and thank heavens we did. In this version of 1942, our heroes and heroines attend lovely flower shows in between air raids, make perfectly-constructed grandiose speeches about the importance of community and perseverance, and maintain stiff-lipped, jaw-jutted looks of ferocity into the middle-distance at all times. The back of the DVD calls it “idealised” which is the understatement of the century- William Wyler might as well have made a film about the Holocaust with musical numbers.

It’s hard to criticise this too much (but I’m going to do it anyway) because Mrs Miniver would have resonated with early-40’s audiences ten times more than today’s cynical crowd. Greer Garson epitomised exactly what every struggling housewife aspired towards, with Walter Pidgeon’s acts of heroism at Dunkirk appealing to the middle-aged men left at home. The vicar’s final speech no doubt send seismic waves through the cinema’s audiences, and rallied up the troops for England no end. Nowadays, however, after a multitude of far grittier war films flagging up a more pacifist message, the film’s attempts at inspiration feel vapid. One might argue that it’s even quite tasteless in its quaint pastoral setting, and it’s lack of exploration of WHY we are fighting a war. As far as these script-writers are concerned, we must all steel ourselves to fight because….well…..ENGLAND. 

It is a credit to Greer Garson that, amidst her lengthy glares of fear and fortitude into the sky (she’s a dream model for any communist stonemason), she manages to turn an unsubtle script into something natural and spontaneous. She gives incredible side-eye when her eldest son returns from Oxford University with woefully misinformed and self-righteous views on the class system, and I found myself supporting her courage and resourcefulness when she ends up with a German parachutist in her kitchen (the life of a 40’s housewife, eh?). 

The film’s vacuity thankfully diminishes as it progresses. Scenes in the air raid shelters are genuinely frightening and I loved how minimalist they were- virtually no dialogue, no changes to camera angles and no special effects. Just the sound of explosions and jolts of fear running through the characters. Very Hitchcockian. And I found the unexpected (if unlikely) death of one of the main characters very moving too.

So Mrs Miniver isn’t all desperately patriotic schmaltz. It’s Important (with a capital I) and played a key role in propping up a war-weary audience. But, by today’s standards, it lacks the nuances of How Green Was My Valley, which wasn’t afraid to portray its characters as flawed, and the sweeping emotions of Gone With the Wind. Next week’s iconic entry will take us to far darker territory. 

Highlight

Like Doug, I found the air raid shelter scenes to be harrowing. A brilliant insight into what it must have been like.

Lowlight

The entire subplot involving a flower show competition. I get that it’s supposed to help audiences identify with the characters, and support the idea of carrying on with everyday life despite the bombings, but a flower show is my idea of hell.

Fun Fact!

Greer Garson won Best Actress for this. Her acceptance speech was a lengthy five and a half minutes (rumours abounded that it was 55 minutes). Since then, Oscar acceptance speeches have had a time limit of 45 seconds. Thanks Greer!

Mark

5/10