All listed chronologically within each category. Some notes follow.
Favorites:
Duck Soup
Ruggles of Red Gap
Make Way for Tomorrow
Once Upon a Honeymoon
My Son John
Okay but not great faves:
The Kid From Spain
Six of a Kind
The Milky Way
The Awful Truth
Love Affair
An Affair to Remember
Dislike with varying degrees of intensity:
Belle of the Nineties
Going My Way
The Bells of St. Mary's
Good Sam
Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!
Satan Never Sleeps
Never seen:
Wild Company
Let's Go Native
Part Time Wife
Indiscreet
McCarey has never been a favorite of mine. A great comedy director, but beginning with Going My Way (a vastly overrated movie I just can't abide) he devoted himself almost exclusively to films reflecting one or both of his twin obsessions: his devout Roman Catholicism and his vehement anti-Communism. Even as a not-very-devout Catholic and lifelong ant-Communist I find these films almost impossible to sit through, with their heavy-handed ickiness.
Even so, I list one of these films, his idiotic and absurd 1952 anti-Red opus My Son John, as one of my favorites of his films, expressly because it's so stupid and lousy that it's a trainwreck worth watching (and it has the last performance of the great Robert Walker, who deserved to go out with something much better). At least it has a top cast and is well-made. Not so Satan Never Sleeps, his last and one of his very worst films, although I occasionally watch even this piece of absolute rubbish because of its literal God-awfulness and, again, as the last screen appearance of one of its stars, the marvelous Clifton Webb.
McCarey was also a great sentimentalist and while I rather like sentiment in general, too often he just got sappy and annoying rather than honest and truly emotional. I can only think how much better An Affair to Remember would have been had McCarey dropped the cuddly priests and, most of all, those screeching, obnoxious kids and their two (like one wasn't one too many) "musical" numbers, among the worst such crap ever put on film. Most people just remember the Grant-Kerr chemistry and forget how dreadful that middle section is.
Still, at his best, he could turn out gems like Duck Soup and Make Way for Tomorrow, among a few others, including some of his shorts. When McCarey received his first Academy Award in 1937 for directing The Awful Truth, he came to the podium and told his peers, "Thanks, but I think you gave it to me for the wrong movie." He thought, correctly, that he should have won it for Make Way for Tomorrow, in my view tied with Duck Soup as the two best films he ever made.
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