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The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944)
Completely-insane Sturges concoction, made at the height of WWII, which manages to bamboozle the Production Code in more ways than practically any other film since the Code's enforcement 10 years earlier. It's basically the story of the romance of Midwestern smalltown friends, Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) and Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken), who's 4-F and unable to serve in the military because when he gets nervous, he sees "spots". Although they seem to love each other, Norval finds himself getting the short end of the stick from the vivacious Trudy, who wants to attend a servicemen's dance before the "boys" ship out for war duty, so she asks Norval to pretend to take her on a date to see a movie triple-feature to keep her ultra-suspicious town constable dad (the hilarious William Demarest) from thinking she's out with the sex-crazed soldiers. Norval isn't happy, but he does it out of love and isn't around when Trudy really does get into major trouble.
Once again, I won't go into specifics of where the plot goes, but I can tell you about some of the ways that Sturges made a film which was completely against almost all the basic rules of the Production Code. Although the film satirizes many things, including family relationships, the police department, the military, lawyers, and small-town gossip, it's in its treatment of sex, marriage and pregnancy where it really blasts off into the stratosphere and gets away with everything it attempts. The fact that a main character in the film could get pregnant and not be completely sure that she was married, is truly mind-boggling. Sturges is able to get away with things by adding scenes which have a possible alternative explanation to everything. The woman wasn't drunk before she got pregnant, she was "dizzy" from hitting her head against a ceiling decoration. She was married before she got pregnant (oh really?), but she can't remember her husband's name (something like Ratzkywatzky) and has no idea where he is or how they could have gotten such a quick marriage.
Deep down, this is a pro-family and pro-American film, but it doesn't find the need to beat about the bush when it comes to dealing with real life and pointing out the flaws which are inherent everywhere. Its prime consideration is to provide as many screwball laughs as possible while trying to push the envelope of what the system allowed. In its own way, this film truly opened the door to more mature subject matter in film after the end of WWII. A few bonus points I enjoy about the film are that it brought back the hilarious, fast-talking characters of McGinty and the Boss from Sturges' directorial debut The Great McGinty, the fact that Trudy's 14-year-old sister (Diana Lynn) seems to know more about life than anybody else in the film, and that the actual miracle in the title can be interpreted in more than one way. Yes, only Preston Sturges could come up with a way to have a possibly unwed, virgin mother do what she does in this movie at Christmas, and still have the censors completely in the dark.
Completely-insane Sturges concoction, made at the height of WWII, which manages to bamboozle the Production Code in more ways than practically any other film since the Code's enforcement 10 years earlier. It's basically the story of the romance of Midwestern smalltown friends, Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) and Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken), who's 4-F and unable to serve in the military because when he gets nervous, he sees "spots". Although they seem to love each other, Norval finds himself getting the short end of the stick from the vivacious Trudy, who wants to attend a servicemen's dance before the "boys" ship out for war duty, so she asks Norval to pretend to take her on a date to see a movie triple-feature to keep her ultra-suspicious town constable dad (the hilarious William Demarest) from thinking she's out with the sex-crazed soldiers. Norval isn't happy, but he does it out of love and isn't around when Trudy really does get into major trouble.
Once again, I won't go into specifics of where the plot goes, but I can tell you about some of the ways that Sturges made a film which was completely against almost all the basic rules of the Production Code. Although the film satirizes many things, including family relationships, the police department, the military, lawyers, and small-town gossip, it's in its treatment of sex, marriage and pregnancy where it really blasts off into the stratosphere and gets away with everything it attempts. The fact that a main character in the film could get pregnant and not be completely sure that she was married, is truly mind-boggling. Sturges is able to get away with things by adding scenes which have a possible alternative explanation to everything. The woman wasn't drunk before she got pregnant, she was "dizzy" from hitting her head against a ceiling decoration. She was married before she got pregnant (oh really?), but she can't remember her husband's name (something like Ratzkywatzky) and has no idea where he is or how they could have gotten such a quick marriage.
Deep down, this is a pro-family and pro-American film, but it doesn't find the need to beat about the bush when it comes to dealing with real life and pointing out the flaws which are inherent everywhere. Its prime consideration is to provide as many screwball laughs as possible while trying to push the envelope of what the system allowed. In its own way, this film truly opened the door to more mature subject matter in film after the end of WWII. A few bonus points I enjoy about the film are that it brought back the hilarious, fast-talking characters of McGinty and the Boss from Sturges' directorial debut The Great McGinty, the fact that Trudy's 14-year-old sister (Diana Lynn) seems to know more about life than anybody else in the film, and that the actual miracle in the title can be interpreted in more than one way. Yes, only Preston Sturges could come up with a way to have a possibly unwed, virgin mother do what she does in this movie at Christmas, and still have the censors completely in the dark.