NFR Project: 'The Miracle of Morgan's Creek' (1944)

 

NFR Project: “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek”

Dir: Preston Sturges

Scr: Preston Sturges

Pho: John F. Seitz

Ed: Stuart Gilmore

Premiere: February 1944

99 min.

Decades before Mony Python, an American filmmaker openly mocked the birth of Christ and got away with it. He parodied the Nativity with a tale of an unwanted pregnancy by an unknown man that turns out to, indeed, be a miracle. This is the kind of stuff that Preston Sturges was smart enough to craft; what’s more impressive is that he did it on the fly and under pressure. In Hollywood.

Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) is a lively young girl (and, as the film states, a MINOR) in an American anytown who is loved pathetically and unsuccessfully by Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken). Norval is unusable by the armed services, as he, when he panics, which is most of the time, sees “The Spots!” Trudy is the daughter of the town’s irascible Constable Kockenlocker (the great William Demarest).

Trudy goes to a party, and gets Norval to cover for her, as they proceed on one of the longest traveling shots in film history – the film is dotted with two-handed takes of Trudy and Norval talking as they stroll, monitoring their relationship as it deepens.

While she’s out, she gets drunk . . . and, dancing, she hits her head when she is lifted skyward into a suspiciously phallic-shaped mirrored ceiling decoration.

She then finds out she’s pregnant (how did this get past the censors?). She can’t remember . . . she suspects she got married to and had sex with someone with a name like “Ratzskywatzsky.” Norval, still loving her deeply, offers to marry her himself. They decide to get married under the name of Ratzkywatzsky, then Trudy can get divorced and marry Norval for real. They get caught. Norval goes to jail. Constable Kockenlocker, seeing Norval’s goodness of heart, breaks him out of jail and helps him rob the bank. Norval escapes, vowing to find Ratzskywatzsky..

He returns six months later. The Kockenlockers have moved away; the Constable was fired. He’s imprisoned again. It’s Christmas Eve, of course.

Trudy comes down to the jail to tell the truth. Then Trudy gives birth! To male sextuplets, no less. The governor and his political fixer (Brian Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff from Sturges’ The Great McGinty [1940]) declare Norval free, and Trudy and Norval as retroactively married. The news confounds the world, which is evidently focused on super-maternities. All of the Axis powers’ leaders are flabbergasted. And all the principals live happily ever after.

It is outrageous. All of the great Sturges performers are present. There’s Bracken as Norval Jones, the classic timid and overwhelmed Sturges hero. The more Norval tries to get things right, he more he makes things worse, with clocklike precision. Betty Hutton plays his beloved Trudy Kockenlocker to perfection. She is the unwilling Madonna of the piece, a good-time gal who gets knocked up by an unknown serviceman. Pianist Diana Lynn is perfectly cast as the smart-aleck little sister who serves as a kind of sarcastic Greek chorus (and she plunks out some low-down blues). The immortal Sturges regular Al Bridge gets a couple of great scenes as a lawyer.

Sturges is making a pointed reference to the free-swinging sexual hospitality the women of the country gave to servicemen during the Second World War. He had a point to make about that, but he couldn’t help himself. He also saw it as a reiteration of the story of the birth of Jesus. Here, an unknown man is the Holy Spirit, Norval is the suffering Joseph, Trudy Mary. The military is given a skewering as well. The Hays Office didn’t like it; neither did the War Department.

Somehow Sturges overcame their objections. He slyly tiptoes around his subject, making the most seemingly oblique yet blatantly overt points with eloquent ease. The film is filled with crackling dialogue that plays with the quick flow of improvisation. It was a huge hit. If there was ever a sterling example of the maintenance of freedom of thought during wartime, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is it.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Mom and Dad.