RvB's After Images: The Miracle of Morgan's Creek

Illegitimacy rates are rising in the US. In a seemingly unrelated story, Dreamgirls pastiches the Supremes' career, suggesting that "The Dreams" weren't allowed to sing about social issues...an argument the musical's makers try plump up by not including a song analogous to the Supremes' hit about unplanned pregnancy, "Love Child." And even The Nativity Story has to hint at the heresy that Mary's well-known child was fathered by a Roman soldier...a story based on a Talmudic rumor so notorious that it was parodied in that touching story of the first Noel, The Life of Brian). All these matters suggest the relevance of The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. It is a miracle, this film. Here, cinema's deftest wielder of ensemble comedy repeatedly violated the film production code, making a comedy about unplanned pregnancy. This, at a time when American movies were forbidden by the censors even to show a woman whose belly was swollen with child. ...
In an archtypical small town, we meet an array of comedic types: a gorgeous but half-bright girl named Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton, who might be described as the Cameron Diaz of her day); her yearning sappy suitor Norval (Eddie Bracken, a shrimpier, frailer Ben Stiller); and the lady's father, the town's constable, the gruff war vet Constable Kockenlocker (played by real-life gruff war vet William "The Sultan of Snarl" Demerest). Urged on by hormones, Trudy longs to "kiss the boys goodbye" at the local military camp, right before they're headed off to World War 2. Her father, who knows what soldiers are like from personal experience, tries to keep her home. But Trudy does what young girls have been doing since the invention of cinema. She pretends to go out on a date with Norval to get past her watchdog father, ditches Norval at the theater, and goes to the big dance at the local church basement. What follows is a montage of accidental drunkenness and a bonk on the head, as Trudy is passed back and forth between three soldiers (on the dance floor, of course). She turns up at dawn, sweetly drunk and with a wedding ring on her finger. She's blacked out most of the evening, but she recalls her new husband's name as something like "Private Irving Razkiwatsi." Soon Trudy discovers she was made pregnant during the mysterious evening. ("For all the talk of lemonade and marriage licenses, [the] point -- that Trudy got drunk and slept with a soldier -- comes across loud and clear," as directror/writer Preston Sturges' biographer Diane Jacobs writes.)

Loyal and gullible as ever, Norval poses as Razkiwatsi to save her honor; this requires the fooling of a Justice of the Peace, a subsequent break from jail, and an exile for the Kockenlockers. The comedy turns on a serious point, and that's a gentle parody of the Nativity. The only really shrewd person in the film, Trudy's little sister Emmy (Diana Lynn) mentions that Trudy isn't the first person to end up pregnant at Christmas under cloudy circumstances. She also comments on a superstition that may be lost on the modern viewer: that "love children" are supposed to be the most good-looking. There is a mock-heroic ending for this debacle; it's as beautiful an out of left-field play as Kevin Mitchell ever made on the San Francisco Giants.

Sturges' specialty was groups in panic, colliding into one another with slapstick falls and boggling wordplay. Demerest was always a marvel in Sturges' hands, achieving almost W. C. Fields-styled levels of comedic surliness, and here is some of the most beautiful physical comedy in the sound era. And in a speech about how long he's yearned for Trudy, Bracken's magnificent cluckiness is the kind of comedy that's just a hairsbreadth from something you'd cry at.

Reading Sturges' memoir, one notes that he speaks of this film without great affection. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek was made in 1942 during Sturges' most furious period of work, when he was creating a deathless string of comedies and running a restaurant besides. As Jacobs notes, the film had financial restrictions, reflected in its back-lot look. Hollywood studios competed with the Army for war material, since the cellulose in cinema stock was also used for gunpowder. Thus releasing a service comedy this volatile had Paramount as nervous as the censors. The movie spent two years in the can, until it was released in January 1944. In his memoirs, Sturges claimed he got letters from soldiers "who said it was tough enough getting girls to go out with without pictures like The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, which threw the parents into a panic and kept girls at home." Despite it all, Sturges claimed a moral purpose for the comedy: "I wanted to show what happens to young girls who disregard their parents' advice and confuse patriotism with promiscuity."

Over the years, I've heard a lot of critiques of this movie. A friend claims that it's a much colder piece of work than Sturges' irreplaceable farces The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story. I saw another friend's date get angry after saw this movie. She claimed that there was nothing at all funny about a woman forced to marry someone she didn't love just because she was pregnant. For whatever reason, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is not included in the recent release of the Preston Sturges Directors Collection.

But that's comedy for you: There's a consensus on tragedy, but it's hard to get agreement on what's humorous, and that's why comedy "sits at the children's table," as Woody Allen said. Note that Sturges' original plan was for a very D. W. Griffith-style melodrama, in which the impregnated girl throws herself into the creek of the title. Instead of drowning herself to save her family from disgrace, Trudy triumphs over gossip and shame. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek certainly counts as a Christmas movie. It also counts as a wartime comedy. In two ways, then, it's right for the times and the season.