New Picture

Going My Way (Paramount) goes the way of tons of Hollywood flesh this season: it is a religious picture (TIME, April 24). It is also one of the year's top surprises. It presents Bing Crosby as a Catholic priest, and gets away with it so gracefully that Crosby, the priesthood and the audience are equal gainers. It offers, in the performance of nutcracker-faced, 56-year-old Barry Fitzgerald, the finest, funniest and most touching portrayal of old age that has yet reached the screen. In so doing, it points the way to the great films which will be possible when Hollywood becomes aware of the richness and delight of human character observed for its own sake.

The story, without rich characterization, would be nothing much. A young priest (Bing Crosby) is sent by his bishop to help out an old one (Barry Fitzgerald) in Manhattan's mortgage-ridden St. Dominic's. For a while, they do not get along; but young Father O'Malley fixes up everything else almost too easily. He deals with a delinquent girl (Jean Heather) so silkily that before long she is married. He handles the jail-fodder kids of the street so astutely that before long they are singing Mozart's Ave Verum and liking it. He even teaches old Father Fitzgibbon how to play golf. He also writes songs which, with the help of an old friend who sings in opera (Metropolitan Diva Rise Stevens), he sells so effectively that the parish, despite a disastrous fire, rises clear of all financial problems. And just before he leaves St. Dominic's to trouble-shoot for another decrepit priest, he brings Father Fitzgibbon's mother across on a surprise trip from Ireland, for the picture's unusually valid and powerful tear-jerking climax.

Strictly speaking, this hardly has a right to pose as a religious film. There is no real contest with evil or with suffering, and the good itself loses half its force, because even the worst people in Going My Way are as sugar-coated as Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. Yet it has, inadvertently, a good deal of genuine religious quality, and is often a beautiful piece of entertainment in spite of its Sunny-Jim story. Leo McCarey's leisured, limpid direction and Steve Seymour's splendid sets are partly responsible for this--the coarse lace half-curtains, waxed floors and seldom-used ashtrays of the rectory are evocative just short of genius. But the best reasons are the loving attention to character, and some magnificent acting. Father Fitzgibbon might have been any brogue-rippling old male biddy. But as Fitzgerald portrays him--senile, vain, childish, stubborn, good, bewildered, stupid--he is the quintessence of the pathos, dignity and ludicrousness which old age can display. Father O'Malley, still more dangerously, might have been one of those brisk, bland up-&-comers who have made an impure science of "not acting like a priest at all." Instead he is subtle, gay, debonair--a wise young priest whose arresting resemblance to Bing Crosby never obscures his essential power.

Going My Way is a sort of friendly contest between two diametrically different kinds of acting: Fitzgerald's, the immensely experienced, stage-wise sort which leaves mere virtuosity miles behind, and Crosby's, which is hardly acting at all, but merely the unaffected exploitation of an amiable personality. The picture shows that neither kind, at its best, can possibly be beat, and that together, they bring just about the last word in teamwork. It will surprise nobody who sees Crosby's performance, and the breadth of his control over the film as a whole, that he has just signed a ten-year contract with Paramount and is preparing--on the side --to make his debut as a producer (first picture: The Great John L.). Even so the picture is not his; it is Fitzgerald's.

" 'Tis Sheet." Back in 1914 a tiny (5 ft. 3 in.), easygoing Irish civil servant named William Joseph Shields stood on the stage of Dublin's great Abbey Theatre, quakingly ready to deliver himself of his first speaking role. It was brief. The play was Sheridan's The Critic and his entire role, as "2nd Sentry," was to meet the cue "All this shall to Lord Burley's ear" with a yes-man's " 'Tis meet it should." Just before the cue, the malicious actor next him whispered, and the terrified Mr. Shields repeated, loud & clear, " 'Tis sheet it mould." He has been a comedian ever since.

Before long Shields was known to Dublin theatergoers as Barry Fitzgerald; he picked up the name, he remembers, from "the man in charge of programs."

For 15 years Fitzgerald acted only part-time, working part-time, too, as a "nominal" student at the Abbey. Gradually he got more important roles and a deeper interest in them; at last he quit his civil service desk for good. His first full-time professional appearance was in The Silver Tassie, in 1929. His friend Sean O'Casey wrote it especially for him.

The Abbey Theatre has never stultified itself with a starring system; if it had, Fitzgerald and Sara Allgood would undoubtedly have been headliners. When the Players toured the U.S. in 1934, a passel of critics and actors gave Fitzgerald a scroll calling him "the most versatile character comedian in the world today." A lot of reputable people still refer to him, automatically, as the finest living actor.

The Casual Life. In spite of such abilities and encomiums, Fitzgerald had a run of negligible roles in Hollywood from the time he and three other Players put The Plough and the Stars on film (under John Ford's direction, 1937) to Going My Way. Said he, on a return trip to the Manhattan stage: "I didn't have the energy to come away. I made a little money and I thought I'd take a holiday. Weeks stretched into months and months into years. ... I didn't like Hollywood. It is a dull and enervating place. And the girls are not half so lovely as they are cracked up to be. They have a hard and anxious look about them." What he did like was the mountaineers of West Virginia, whose reticence and modesty remind him of people in remote parts of Ireland. Even better, Fitzgerald likes to stroll around Harlem. "The Negroes there seem to live so casual a life. And there is much in a casual life."

Fitzgerald is a slow "study," not because of dull memory but because he learns the character instead of the lines. The role of Father Fitzgibbon was built up bit by bit from Fitzgerald's remembrance of a priest in Ireland; he and McCarey did a good deal of restyling on the set; and a lot of the character emerged for the first time in the shooting, as fresh as nascent oxygen.

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