Free When Satan Wore a Cross by Fred Rosen

unsentimentally—Spencer Tracy. Tracy didn’t have a sentimental bone in his body. He made you believe in the two-fisted but always virtuous priest and won the 1938 Best Actor Oscar for his performance. Then in 1944, Leo McCarey made film history by humanizing the rapidly developing archetype of the virtuous priest. A silent film director, McCarey specialized in comedies. It was McCarey who had teamed Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy for the first time on screen. Effortlessly bridging into directing sound films, in the 1930s he directed such disparate screen comedians as the Marx Brothers and Cary Grant.
    In 1944 at forty-six years of age, McCarey was at the height of his creative powers. He decided to use everything he had learned along the way to write, direct, and produce a film that would reduce its audience to crying tears of laughter one moment and flat-out tears of sentiment the next. McCarey’s idea was to refine the American priest myth to its ultimate conclusion. He called it Going My Way, and his premise was simple.
    Father Chuck O’Malley, a young, golf-playing, happy-go-lucky priest, is sent by the New York Archdiocese to a broke Roman Catholic parish in the slums of Manhattan. There, O’Malley clashes with crusty Father Fitzgibbon, an old-school Catholic priest with a secret heart of gold. Throw in an extraneous love plot where O’Malley plays cupid and sings a few songs, and pretty soon, everything works out.
    Working through his own devices and of course the grace of God, Father O’Malley saves the parish; reunites Fitzgibbon with his beloved Irish mother flown over especially from the ol’ Sod; gets Romeo and Juliet together, and then moves on like the benevolent angel he really is.
    That was the script McCarey the screenwriter wrote. Then McCarey the director took over. To play O’Malley, the key role, he cast popular radio crooner and light screen comedian Bing Crosby. Besides the classic Road movies he did with his friend and golf partner Bob Hope, Crosby’s other films always made money. He had an easy screen presence. You just trusted him, even when he was duping Hope in the Road movies. So perhaps it was natural, then, that McCarey, who understood human nature better than most directors, decided to cast the scene-stealing character actor Barry Fitzgerald as Father Fitzgibbon.
    On set, the two leads clashed, just like their characters. It made their screen scenes that much more real. When the time came for each to show the other chaste, priestly devotion, their bickering with each other made their acting that much more compelling to watch. Most importantly, Crosby and Fitzgerald’s performances, as the smart young priest and the wise, crusty older priest, both godly men, became the public’s perception of who and what priests were until almost the end of the millennium.
    McCarey’s film was a huge, huge (did I say huge?) hit. It topped the year’s box office, but in the Pacific Northwest, it was even bigger. Bing Crosby came from Spokane, Washington, and the film played particularly well in Washington and Oregon. Years later Beulah Rose, who along with her husband George “Bud” Rose operated movie theaters in Milton and Freewater, Oregon, would remember that the film played there for a very, very long time, and with good reason.
    Going My Way made Hollywood history when McCarey became the first person to win three Oscars for the same picture as writer, director, and producer. But more important to the public that relates better to the stars, Bing Crosby trumped his good friend Bob Hope by taking home the Oscar for Best Actor.
    Behind the scenes was a different matter.
    Gary Crosby, Bing’s eldest of four sons by his first wife, actress/singer Dixie Lee, would later write in his 1984 book, Going My Own Way, that his father was abusing his four kids while playing Father O’Malley. That made Crosby’s Best Actor Oscar a well-deserved award. Costar Barry Fitzgerald had actually been nominated