Miracle of Morgan's Creek

In Preston Sturges' comedy, Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) war-time rationing is in full force:  sugar used for lemonade is being conserved and the schlemihl hero, Norval Jones, has a gas card that limits fuel that he can buy for his jalopy.  The film critic, David Thomson, remarks that, during filming, a scene in which a vehicle skidded was cut -- Hollywood didn't want to be perceived as wasting rubber.  The one thing that is not in short supply, however, seems to be sex; there's no rationing in effect there and the movie depicts in slapstick style the consequences of lonesome soldiers frolicking with small-town girls on the eve of deployment.  (In fact, one of the minor characters has written a newspaper editorial on this very problem.)  The war effort on the home front induces a sort of collective delirium and events proceed in a fever dream of yearning, intoxication, and febrile patriotism.  The memory of the licentiousness surrounding World War One looms over the picture.  The heroine's father, Mr. Kockenlocker (played by Sturges' stalwart, William Demarest) was a soldier in the Great War and he recalls with dismay the swath that A.E.F cut through the local maidens in France.  Hence, his skepticism and alarm when his comely daughter, Trudy, proposes to fraternize with soldiers about to be shipped overseas, asking his permission to attend various patriotic events that turn out to involve increasingly frenzied jitterbug dancing, these orgies sponsored by well-meaning folks in town.  Kockenlocker, the belligerent town cop, forbids Trudy's participation in these events -- she is apparently a minor.  Trudy has an admirer, the milquetoast Norval Jones, a nervous stuttering bank teller who has been rejected from military service on account of high blood pressure, agitation, and the tendency to see "spots" when excited.  He's been in love with Trudy since they were children together,  but to no apparent avail.  Hoping to hook-up with the more virile servicemen about to be shipped overseas, Trudy persuades Norval to take her to a triple feature at the local movie palace, but, then, implores him to let her use his car so she can attend the USO dance -- poor Norval has to wait for her through the triple-feature scheduled to end at 1:15 am.  The camera follows Trudy (Betty Hutton) who dances with a succession of soldiers at several venues; dancing here is an obvious surrogate for something approaching sex.  At one of the dance-halls, Trudy gets pitched into the air during some wild dancing and conks her head on a 1940's version of a disco ball.  Norval waits for her at the theater, increasingly distraught as the hours pass.  Around eight a.m, Trudy shows up disheveled, either drunk or concussed, with Norval's car in ruins.  She's got a curtain ring on her finger and the car is trailing a "Just Married" placard.  Trudy's memory isn't too clear but she recalls vaguely that she married someone whose name contains several "z" letters, but has no marriage license, and turns out to be pregnant to boot.  (Critics marvel that a film with this plot line could be imagined, let alone filmed in 1942 when the picture was made.  Apparently, there was sufficient concern about the movie's subject matter that it's release was deferred until 1944 when the picture was shown in quick succession with its thematic sequel Hail the Conquering Hero, a similarly anarchic home-front picture but one that is more conventionally patriotic.)  Ultimately, Trudy admits her plight to Norval who chivalrously offers to marry her, even though this plan carries with it the danger of bigamy -- after all, she's apparently lawfully married to the soldier-boy with the double "z's" in his name.  More complications ensue and Norval is locked-up, leading to a long scene in which Kockenlocker, the town gendarme, tries to induce him to escape.  (Norval is not only a wimp but a bit dull-witted to boot; in this scene, we learn that 1940's small-town cops carried blackjacks in their back pockets).  Fleeing town, Norval vows to find the caddish soldier married to Trudy but now MIA.  Nine months pass and Norval returns to town, his mission having failed.  Trudy has her child -- in fact, she has her child six times in a row, being delivered of sextuplets.  This "miracle" at Morgan's Creek becomes an international sensation (in vignettes, we see Hitler and Mussolini reacting with dismay at the fecundity of American women).  Norval is instantly admitted to the military, promoted to officer status, equipped with a dumb-looking sword, and his various transgressions, including an attempted bank robbery are all forgiven in the ensuing media frenzy.  

The film moves at a lightning pace, is crammed with laugh-out-loud gags and exemplifies Hollywood surrealism at its most witty.  The scenes involving Trudy's labor and delivery occur on Christmas Eve, therefore, imparting a faintly blasphemous tint to the proceedings.  There is a wandering cow that invades a drawing room, a bit like something that might have been imagined by Dali and Bunuel; Kockenlocker is using a hammer to hang Xmas-tree ornaments, a curious detail, and, for some reason, a climactic city council meeting takes place in a fire station with a spectacular spiral stair and a pole that Kockenlocker uses to reach ground level before slugging the officious and hypocritical town banker.  The slapstick is violent and many of the gags involve spectacular pratfalls and people socking each other in the face.  Everyone is armed and dangerous -- people brandish guns at each other and there is (as in Hail the Conquering Hero) a palpable sense of lurking incipient violence.  (Trudy and Norval plot suicide and discuss in detail how they will drown themselves in Morgan's Creek to avoid shame.)  The final gag, the sextuplets born to Trudy and their unknown father, has a grim aspect -- the world is at war and mothers must replenish the inventory of young men slaughtered as cannon fodder on the various battlefields in Europe and the south Pacific.  

Sturges' direction is sprightly.  the film is structured as an extended flashback in which a man darts away from a crowd of reporters to call the governor (who doesn't even know that the rural backwater, Morgan's Creek, is in his State).  The "miracle" is suppressed at the outset and, only, revealed in stages as the narrative progresses.  Eddie Bracken plays Norval, an odd bit of casting because the actor was a renowned light-weight boxer and not a feckless weakling as portrayed in the movie -- Norval says masochistically that he's too ugly for the gorgeous Trudy and, indeed, he has pug's flattened features with a much-broken nose that looks like a parrot's beak .  In the film's witty ending, we see Norval reacting in dumb-show to the revelation that he is the putative father of six children -- he shrieks with real horror and the screen is speckled with "spots" depicting his discomfiture from the point of view of the audience.  The movie manages to fuse light romantic comedy with a provocative, even rather sardonic and grim subject matter -- the plight of young women seduced and abandoned by soldiers in the context of a war in which many of these heroes will not return from the battlefield. The film is clearly a predicate to Sturges' equally sardonic and, rather, bitter comedy Hail the Conquering Hero which addresses this subject matter from the perspective of the male noncombatant, also played by Eddie Bracken.  (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek takes the point of view of its female characters, Trudy and her kid sister, Emily, clearly the brightest of the various dim bulbs in the movie, who comments with brittle sarcasm on the war fever afflicting everyone in the  picture.  The absence of able-bodied men on the home-front is shown by two startling images -- Trudy is introduced lip-syncing a basso profundo tune played on a record (it's an astonishing image) and, later, at one of the dances hosted by the USO, a a fat older woman plays an impressive gut-bucket trombone.  This is an excellent film, slightly better, I think, than the more conventionally jingoistic Hail the Conquering Hero made immediately after this picture and, in some respects, a tribute to the Marine Corps.  Although there is some war-time patriotism around the edges of this picture, the movie is too anarchic to be plausibly interpreted as part of the war effort.