The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943)

Directed and produced by Preston Sturges

It’s war-time, and Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) goes to a party for departing soldiers. The party ends up lasting all night long and when Trudy (who “never drinks”) sobers up, she realises that she married one of the soldiers, though she can’t remember his name and has no licence to prove it. It’s a disagreeable circumstance that becomes disastrous when she discovers she’s pregnant. Agreeing to help her is Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken), the young man who’s loved her since elementary school. The trouble is, neither has a good solution to the dilemma, and what began as a simple dance becomes an international sensation.

A typically well-written and fast-paced Sturges comedy, this film tackles small-town morality, corrupt politics, single parenthood, friendship and war-time behaviour, all with farce on the surface and not a little cynicism beneath. It’s a gem of a movie and a tribute to what a clever man can get away with under the watchful eye of censorship.

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek must have made censors nervous with its depiction of a promiscuous girl (albeit accidentally promiscuous, under the influence of alcohol, which itself could not have made everyone comfortable) and soldiers ready for some quick physical fun. But the film is certainly not exploitative, and these elements merely set up the plot. Don’t expect the plot to have too much sense, though: the excellent writing is in the dialogue, not the story-line.

But what writing! Sturges constructs characters that seem shallow (witness Trudy’s initially selfish use of Norval, and William Demarest’s apparent caricature of her father) but are, in fact, deeper than they seem. Trudy evolves into a truly likeable woman, and Bracken portrays Norval as a sap, but a sap with dreams and ambitions, crushed hopes and shattered dreams. Demarest is a single father (a superb counter-point to his child’s impending single motherhood) who masks his fear of parental missteps with bluster and idle threats (imagine a modern father telling a smart-alec 14 year old daughter, “Some day they're just gonna find your hair ribbon and an axe someplace. Nothing else! The Mystery of Morgan's Creek!”)

Behind the writing is a knowledge that when people get into trouble, it may be inadvertent, it may be their own fault, but they are still people in trouble, and spectators may gossip and laugh – as may movie audiences – but those with problems are real, feeling humans.

  

Comedy is not neglected for character and moral. Norval’s periodic panic attacks are hilarious as is the wedding scene and Demarest’s attempts to help a prisoner escape jail. There is much that may be considered slapstick (Demarest must have been a spry 51 year old to take those falls) but most is incorporated into a frantic, frenetic story-line. Strangely, it even makes sense to include Mussolini and Hitler, the latter played by Bobby Watson in one of his many portrayals of the dictator, one of which, in The Hitler Gang, was reviewed in this blog in March. (As a Canadian, I chuckled at how, even then, my countrymen were portrayed as polite: a newspaper headline suggests an indignant but open-minded prime minister.) Also brought in are Brian Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff, repising their characters from Sturges’s earlier The Great McGinty; the facility of their crooked politics provides an excellent framework for the story, as well as a suitably farcical deus ex machina.

The direction is on target, especially in the long tracking shots, featuring lengthy passages of dialogue between Bracken and Hutton as they stroll through the town. Much of the complicated photography was thanks to John Seitz, a veteran cinematographer and inventor, who started in movies in 1916 and continued for 44 years.

Nothing is typical of its time or of films in general in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, yet it was immensely popular when released, and remains so, for those fortunate enough to see it these days. I recommend that you be one of them.