Preston Sturges and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
Millions to be had
In the late twenties, Preston Sturges wrote plays for Broadway. At that time, he acted sporadically, appearing in several of his own plays. He had a day-job – he managed one of his mother’s department stores in Manhattan. He was a bachelor; his second marriage to a New York City socialite and heiress had ended in divorce in 1927,
There is a story, probably apocryphal, that the Hollywood screen writer Herman Mankiewitz (“Mank”) sent a telegram to the Ben Hecht, a writer working in the New York theatrical business. Mank’s telegram told Hecht to come to Hollywood: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.” One can presume that Sturges received similar advice. And so Sturges went west, began doctoring scripts and writing additional dialogue. Around 1936, he completed on spec, a script called The Great McGinty. In 1939, Sturges traded rights to the script to Paramount Pictures in exchange for being granted the opportunity to direct the movie. (According to the legend, Paramount paid him 10 dollars for the script, an increase over the buck that Sturges had proposed.) The film was a hit and, between 1940 and 1949, Sturges directed ten films now regarded as classics and, among the best movies made in this country, during the war and immediate post-war period.
These films are: The Great McGinty (1940), Christmas in July (1940), The Lady Eve(1941), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1942), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), The Great Moment (1944), The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (1947), and Unfaithfully Yours (1949). All of these pictures are comedies of one sort or another with the exception of The Great Moment, a bio-pic about the Boston dentist, W.T.G. Morton, the inventor of surgical anesthesia. (The Great Moment written by Sturges as The Triumph over Pain seems to have been conceived as a sardonic comedy but was edited beyond recognition by Paramount.) All of these pictures were prestige productions starring top Hollywood talent – actors in these movies include Henry Fonda, Betty Hutton, Joel McCrea, Claudette Colbert, Rudy Vallee, Rex Harrison and Veronica Lake, among others. (In addition, Sturges formed stock repertoire company of characters actor, many of them more indelibly present in his films than the leading players – these actors include William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, and many others whose names you won’t know but who will be familiar to you when you see them on screen.)
Critics regard Sturges’ films made in the 1940's as the “apotheosis of the screwball comedy.”
Embracing a Guinea Pig
Sturges was born in 1898 in Chicago. He was the son of a beautiful and wealthy heiress, Mary Estelle Dempsey, who had an unfortunate romantic encounter with a traveling salesman. (Sturges was born Edmund Preston Biden and named after his father.) Sturges always claimed that no one, including his mother, had any idea she was pregnant until she delivered her son – there are echoes of this motif in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, another so-called “immaculate conception.”
Sturges’ mother decamped to Europe to avoid the humiliating marriage to Edmund Biden and had the relationship annulled. In Europe, Mary Estelle changed her name to the more aristocratic-sounding Mary Desti or Mary D’este. For the first couple years of his life, Sturges was raised by his maternal grandparents in the Windy City. In 1902, his mother married a wealthy New York stockbroker, Solomon Sturges, who adopted the little boy. Sturges recalled his adoptive father as being the exact opposite of his wacky, free-spirited, and promiscuous mother. (In his films, Sturges always shows a certain furtive affection for sober, if avaricious, bankers and financiers.)
Mary D’este Sturges gallivanted around Europe, often with her small son in tow. She was friends with Isadora Duncan, the famous dancer, and had a torrid romance with Aleistar Crowley, the Great Beast and Satanist. (She helped him with writing of his book Magick). For much of his youth, Sturges lived in France where he learned to speak fluent French. His mother was a camp follower of Isadora Duncan and Sturges recalled being taken from country to country in the company of the dancer and her somewhat eccentric, Bohemian friends.
In 1916, Sturges was working on Wall Street as a courier. He enlisted in the Army in 1917, didn’t see combat, but wrote some notable humor pieces for the Armed Forces’ publications. After the Great War, he managed one of his mother’s department stores, the Manhattan Desti Emporium. It was while working at Desti’s that Sturges invented water-proof (“kiss-proof”) lipstick for which he held a patent.
In the late twenties, Sturges, who cut a dashing figure, was dating a well-known Broadway actress. The actress, who seems to be like a character in Sturges’ movies, reportedly said to him that he was a ‘complete bore” (this seems unlikely) and that “the only reason I am going out with you, sir, is for the same reason a scientist embraces a guinea pig, I just like to try out my situations on you so I can see how they turn out.” She further told him that she was dating him for “research purposes” involving a play for which she was auditioning. Not surprisingly, this declaration led to a fight and Sturges’ claimed that he could write a better Broadway play than anything on stage at the time in one month’s time. Sturges made good on the bet and wrote a play that was produced on the Great White Way. He, then, labored on Broadway for a couple years before departing for Hollywood.
As script-doctor and composer of “additional dialogue,” Sturges wrote parts of The Invisible Man (1933), Imitation of Life (1934), Love before Breakfast (1936), and, as well, was credited with about a half-dozen screenplays. This work led him to his breakthrough into directing with The Great McGinty (for which he won a screenplay Oscar) in 1940.
Sturges directed six films, beginning with The Great McGinty and concluding with The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek in quick succession. He was given artistic carte blanche on these films and made them without studio interference. However, his conflicts with the Breen Office over censorship of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek raised red flags with certain studio executives – James Agee, the famous critic, wrote, rather ungallantly that the “Breen Office had been raped in its sleep” with the release of Morgan’s Creek. By 1943, Sturges was the third highest paid man in the United States but storm clouds were looming. Paramount had a surfeit of films and held back Sturges’ pictures. Studio bosses thought that Hail, the Conquering Hero! was too hot to handle – Sturges’ implicit critique of the military proved to be controversial and Paramount re-cut the picture and tinkered with its ending. After a disastrous screening, Sturges was called back to restore the picture to his original design, but his confidence in Paramount was shaken. His seven picture contract was coming to an end and the studio interfered with his drama about with the invention of anesthesia, The Great Moment.
When his contract with Paramount was not renewed, Sturges explored other ventures – always interested in technology, he founded an engineering firm and bought a night club, called The Players. A passion for aviation brought him close to Howard Hughes and the aeronautical, and Hollywood, tycoon bankrolled Sturges next film The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, a come-back vehicle for the silent slapstick star Harold Lloyd. The picture was released to disastrous reviews in 1947, withdrawn from circulation by the producer, Howard Hughes, and, then, re-edited in breach of the contract between Sturges and Hughes, an agreement that gave Sturges’ the final cut. Re-released in 1950 as Mad Wednesday, the movie flopped again. (Sturges said that Hughes cut out “all the best stuff and added a talking horse at the end.”) In the interim, Sturges’directed Unfaithfully Yours (1948) as a free-lancer for Fox. This picture, highly admired by Quentin Tarantino, is a pitch-black slapstick comedy with an intricate and innovative narrative. The movie got good reviews but was disliked by the public due to its subject matter, the murder of an unfaithful wife played for laughs. This was the last movie that Sturges made over which he exercised creative control.
By this time, Sturges was working on Vendetta, a film noir starring Hughes’ girlfriend and protegee, Faith Domergue. Hughes originally hired the renowned Austrian director, Max Ophuls, to helm the production based on an adaptation prepared by Sturges –he said it was his best screenplay. Hughes didn’t like the way that Ophuls was working on the film and fired him, ordering that Sturges complete the movie. Sturges supported Ophuls and, after a few weeks, quit the production, effectively terminating his four-year work with Howard Hughes.
After 1950, Sturges couldn’t get any traction in Hollywood. Further, his life was complicated by litigation with the IRS – he had underpaid taxes and ended up losing his Sunset Boulevard restaurant and bar, The Players, to the Feds. (In some ways, his story parallels the travails of another director who shot to fame in the forties, Orson Welles.) Sturges shopped around some scripts, made a movie in France (also unsuccessful), but the fish weren’t biting. He worked in a desultory way on Broadway, but didn’t achieve much of anything. In 1960, he closeted himself at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City to write his autobiography, titled Events leading up to my Death. While writing the book, he had a massive heart attack and died.
Betty Hutton
Betty Hutton was born in Michigan in 1921. She was a gifted singer and dancer. Hollywood agents discovered her singing with a big band in Detroit. Like Preston Sturges, she enjoyed about a decade of fame, breaking through with Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and, effectively, concluding her film career with 1952 circus melodrama The Greatest Show on Earth (Cecil B. Demille). She was well-paid for her work in the late forties and early fifties, including Annie Get Your Gun (1950) in which she stars. Later in her life, her troubled upbringing seems to have caught up with her. She became addicted to booze and prescription painkillers to the point that she was unable to work in the movie business. Somehow, she came under the influence of a Catholic priest, Father Maguire, who seems to have rehabilitated her – for some years, she worked as a housekeeper at Maguire’s rectory in Rhode Island. In the 80's, she returned to college and earned a Master’s Degree in psychology. She died in 2007.
Hutton is polarizing figure in American movie criticism. Some critics such as James Agee loved her to distraction and wrote rapturously about her performances. Others didn’t care for her at all. She exemplifies the wholesome girl-next-door appeal that was popular in the war years, although, of course, with a sharp edge. David Thomson observes that she is always the aggressor in love stories in which acts – she pursues the man not vice-versa. For what it’s worth, Ludwig Wittgenstein said that she was his favorite movie star.
William Demarest
William Demarest was born in St. Paul in 1892, but raised in Bergen, New Jersey. He was slapstick comedian and specialist in prat falls – his entrance on stage always culminated with a spectacular fall. (His artistry in this metier is visible in the two dramatic falls that he takes, without stunt double, in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek – he was able to kick his legs up almost six feet in the air before falling catastrophically on his backside.) After working in vaudeville with his wife, Estelle Colette – their act was called Colette and Demarest -- he migrated to Hollywood where he appeared in eighty or ninety films over his career. Demarest was a favorite with Sturges and appeared often as part of his stock company. He was a successful character actor and ended his career on television as Uncle Bub in My Three Sons (215 episodes between 1965 and 1972) although he also acted in shows as disparate as Bonanza and The Twilight Zone. He died in 1983.
Eddie Bracken
Eddie Bracken doesn’t make it into David Thomson’s authoritative Biographical Dictionary of Film. This reflects the fact that Bracken was, in effect, a character actor even when he was cast as the leading man. (As you will recall, he mournfully expostulates as to his less-than-Matinee-idol looks in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.) Bracken was born in 1915 and died in 2002. He is the only actor to appear in films with two American Presidents – he acted with Ronald Reagan in The Girl from Jones Beach (1949) and with Donald Trump in Home Alone II (1992).
Bracken was a child star on vaudeville, beginning in show business when he was nine years old. He appeared in innumerable TV shows and movies but is best known for the two pictures that he made with Preston Sturges during World War II; in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, he is essentially in a supporting role to Betty Hutton’s Gertrude Kockenlocker although he is on-screen with her through much of the movie; however, in Sturges’ follow-up, Hail, the Conquering Hero! he is clearly cast in the part of the leading man. Bracken specialized in playing nervous, twitchy weaklings – but he was against type: in fact, he was a tough guy and had won a Golden Gloves nationwide competition as a lightweight. Once when Sturges was mercilessly berating Betty Hutton and Diane Lane (who plays Emmy), Bracken cocked his fist and threatened the director, who backed down. Bracken’s profile is pugilistic – it seems that his nose has been broken and healed as a beak of squashed bone.
Perpetual Crisis
Preston Sturges’ ten films, a decade of movies, documents a world without normalcy. His movies are about perpetual crisis and stage chaos as slapstick comedy: in his signature films, everyone is in a state of hysteria, war fever, and a mob mentality with violent overtones lurks beneath the surface gaiety. Sturges shows us an America that is convulsed by the Great Depression and, then, without transition, slips into the febrile confusion of the Second World War. The Great McGinty and, most especially, Sullivan’s Travels depict American society in the grip of the Great Depression – these films are about bums, hoboes, chain gangs, and poverty. (Sullivan’s Travels, ostensibly a frothy screwball comedy, has many sequences and shots that channel Walker Evans and other Depression era photographers). Sturges’ films overtly about the home front (The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and the equally cynical Hail, the Conquering Hero!) are both representations of an America at War. Although the films take place in a bucolic, small-town America, untouched by combat, the pictures depict the sensibility, that is, the “psycholology” (to quote the affable sergeant in The Miracle) of a population gripped by war fever. The conjunction of Sturges’ special gifts for chaotic and violent slapstick, feverish high velocity dialogue, and savage gallow’s humor match the temper of the times. Crisis was Sturges’ subject and the Depression and War that followed it provided ample opportunities for the exercise of his particular specialty.
Wars result in casualties. Sturges suggests that one of the casualties of war is the ordinary, gender-based relations between the sexes – the home front is invaded by sexually predatory soldiers interacting with equally libidinous young women. Young people are in a bustle to mate and produce more soldiers for the battlefield – the parties and dances on the home-front provide a last opportunity for sex, that is, love before dying. The shadow of death bullies soldiers and girls into intercourse. Constable Kockenlocker (a suggestive name to be sure) knows from his days with the American Expeditionary Force about what happens between small-town girls and soldiers passing through their villages – he learned this in 1918 and doesn’t want these lessons applied to his two daughters. War time romances are characterized by a sort of frenzy, shown in the dancing and party scenes, an urgency that will not tolerate delayed gratification – the soldier at the orgiastic parties sponsored by the good folk at Morgan’s Creek suggests that “we should all get married” (code for “we should all get laid”) and seems to speak in a sort of a trance.
The War casts its shadow over the entire film. Gas is rationed – Norval has a “gas card”. He says that they can’t drive to a local swimming hole, maybe 15 miles away, to drown themselves because frivolous travel of this sort would be frowned-upon and deemed inimical to the War Effort. Lemonade at the party is made without sugar; the sweet stuff is required on the Front lines. Notice, how Trudy grimaces when she drinks the punch – a scene that is, also, coded evidence for intoxication, a state of inebriation that the movie otherwise is at pains to deny. (Trudy relaxes her morals because of a head injury – she’s flung into a reflecting ball, a sort sort of proto-disco ball at the party; but it’s pretty clear that there’s a subtext of drunkenness; this is how the locals interpret her behavior). A key plot point, Norval’s apparent bank robbery, is motivated by the fact that all of his money is tied-up in War Bonds and he has to steal funds equal to the value of those securities to make his escape in the film’s last couple reels.
A deep and pervasive undertow of grief and mourning characterizes the movie. Norval mourns the fact that he can’t wear the uniform of the armed forces – he’s been deemed unsuitable for service due to his apparent tendencies toward hysteria (“the spots! The spots!). He says that he would rather possess an uniform, an emblem that he is valuable to the war effort, than have sex with his girlfriend – the uniform is more important to him than Trudy. People are afflicted with personal losses, a metaphor for fatalities incurred in the War. Kockenlocker is a widower, still grieving (along with his daughters) the death of his wife. Norval is an orphan – his state of persistent anxiety, expressed in somatic symptoms, may have something to do with the fact that he is state-raised. (At one point, he fantasizes about the director of the orphanage making a kindly appearance to bid orphans now in uniform a fond farewell – after all, they have neither mother nor father.) The dance party sponsored by the town has a elegiac aspect – the soldiers are “poor dumb kids” that are going off to combat and “may never be seen again.” Someone consoles Trudy by noting that the war will produce many women in her exact condition – that is mothers with babies born posthumously to fathers killed in combat or, at least, missing in action either literally or figuratively. There will be “millions like you,” Trudy is told. People, particularly girls, are said to “be cryin’ for the boys.” As the sex-hungry girls and soldiers drive drunkenly through the town, they celebrate the fact that life and its pleasures are transitory – “row, row, your boat” since “life is but a dream.” When Norval as Ignatz and Trudy try to procure a wedding license, the Justice of the Peace’s wife states the obvious: “it’s another army couple.”
Gender role reversals are central to the Home Front mentality, although no one particularly desires this breach of normalcy. Women are working, liberated, but uneasy in their status as breadwinners. (Trudy explicitly longs for a conventional marriage and conventional, 1940-style gender roles but, perhaps, we should question her sincerity.) Men on the Home Front are emasculated – if you’re not in uniform, you wear an apron as does Constable Kockenlocker. The pacific Norval has taken cooking classes, which he enjoyed, and sewing, not so happily as a way to stay close to Trudy in High School. But it’s no accident that the gentle, put-upon and masochistic Norval has studied female home economics. If you’re not getting ready to fight, you are figuratively a woman. But the women in this movie are masculine: an old lady plays a convincing gut-bucket trombone and the Jazz ensemble at the dance are all women. Trudy is first seen mouthing the basso profundo of a song on what seems to be LP record. The image is shocking, grotesque, and uncanny – a petite woman sings in the voice of a man. (And the song, significantly, is about brave souls “asleep in the deep” – that is, men drowned at sea, certainly a current concern with battleships lost in naval combat and merchant marine vessels sunk by submarines in the North Atlantic. Some critics believe the song is “Asleep in the Deep, but, in fact, it was composed for the movie by Sturges and is called “The Bell of the Deep.”) Poor Norval, who wishes that a uniform could be issued to those men serving on the Home Front, observes that there are even women in uniform – he calls WACs “wackos.”
War seems to be the perpetual state of crisis documented in Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. The ghost of the Great War, a generation earlier, manifests in Kockenlocker’s half-crazed belligerence. Norval, finally, gets the uniform for which he lusts when he takes Trudy to the Justice of the Peace in a vain effort to obtain a marriage license in the name of the mysterious, absconded “Ignatz Ratzskiwatski” – he’s dressed in the decaying ghost of a uniform, it keeps ripping and falling apart, of a AEF soldier (or, perhaps, a Horse Marine, also an artifact of the Great War.) The Great War’s funereal presence driving events in the film is materialized in the embalmed uniform. Someone notes that Norval doesn’t exactly look like General MacArthur in his uniform that the lawyer claims is really just for “Boy Scouts” or, perhaps, “Woodsmen of the World” lodge brothers. (The AEF uniform rhymes with the ridiculous martial costume, complete with a great phallic sword, that adorns Norval after he is credited with increasing the number of potential troops as cannon fodder for the War by six. His prowess as a father in a World at War is signified by the sword dangling from his midsection – Norval’s prayers have come true; he finally has his uniform.)
War fever has made everyone wildly aggressive and psychotically bellicose. The level of violence in this Home Front picture is staggering. There are combat action films that feature less thuggery and assault than Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. Sooner or later, everyone brandishes a gun – Kockenlocker encourages Norval to propose to Trudy by pointing, not just one, but two, big revolvers at him. The Justice of the Peace pulls a big pistol and aims it at Norval. Norval points a gun at Kockenlocker when the latter encourages him to escape. The vicious banker, Tuerke, menaces Norval with a gun near the end of the movie. Kockenlocker enforces the law through threats of physical violence – he carries a sap or blackjack on his uniform. (And his daughters revenge themselves on him for his own violence directed at them by repeatedly conking him on the head with the club while also strangling him half-to-death with a rope.) Twice Kockenlocker rears back to kick the backside of his daughter, Emmy, although this just results in a pratfall. But Kockenlocker seems genuinely menacing in several scenes – he attacks Norval when he brings Trudy back late from the Ball and there is savage fight with the two girls clawing at their father. Another fight of this sort, depicted as serious and potentially injurious, ensues when Norval tries to propose to Trudy – again, the two young women have to knock their father down and pin him to the ground. At one point, Kockenlocker chases Trudy up the stairs in the house bellowing in rage – he doesn’t catch her and she shelters behind a locked bedroom door, but what, the audience wonders, would have happened if she had not been so fleet of foot. Kockenlocker, the WWI war veteran is a violent misogynist, and threatens to murder Emmy. We learn that Kockenlocker has beat up the banker Tuerke, inflicting a gaping wound that required six stitches. When the City Fathers meet, inexplicably in the town’s Fire Station, there’s a riot with the men punching each other and, in the melee, Kockenlocker manages to slug Tuerke in the eye. Kockenlocker, in fact, is so weirdly violent that he uses a hammer to assault an inoffensive Christmas tree and, even, beats up a cow. Kockenlocker, the old WWI veteran, seems to embody the mindless violence that is fostered by the war – the solution to every problem involves a blackjack or gun or fist. At various points, rooms or streets fill up with menacing crowds of men; at every point, the public seems about to devolve into some kind of lynch mob. (This motif is even more clear in Hail, the Conquering Hero! in which a phalanx of shell-shocked Marines wanders around heavily armed with clubs and hammers, always on the verge of attacking the civilians around them.) Slapstick comedy is aggressive and, often, not a pretty thing to see – but the level of violence in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek certainly seems excessive to the film’s rather mild, even gynecological, comedy.
The War accordingly has destabilized Morgan’s Creek and the Home Front is tremulous with lust, gender reversals, suppressed grief, and hysterical violence.
Style
Sturges comedies in the forties represent the culmination two styles thought to be incommensurate – his films couple complex and witty dialogue with violent slapstick comedy. No other director successfully synthesized the fast-talking dialogue of “screwball comedies” (His Girl Friday, The Awful Truth, Ball of Fire) with the visual humor and stylized mugging featured in silent comedies. (Sturges said his scripts were full of “spritz-dialogue” – that is, fizzy, fast patter full of malapropisms, allusions to other films and current events, and intricate word-play.)
So that dialogue sequences achieve full-effect, Sturges engineers very long takes. (Trudy and Norval’s walk to the theater which sets up the film’s basic situation is managed in a take that lasts four minutes, the camera gliding alongside the characters as they talk and argue; there is a reprise of this scene later when Trudy admits to Norval that she is pregnant and the characters contemplate suicide. Later, Trudy and her kid sister, Emmy, also talk as the camera tracks them through the elaborate set simulating a small town.) In general, Sturges’ favors long takes – for instance, the scene in which Mr. Kockenlocker brandishes a pistol and threatens Norval about marriage to Trudy. Sturges, however, punctuates these scenes with slapstick gags; again, consider Kockenlocker discharging the gun in the direction of Norval and his stunned exit from the porch into the house, walking straight through a closed screen door.
David Bordwell, in his book Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers changed Movie Storytelling (2017) observes that Sturges was a pioneer in developing complex narrative structures that revolutionized film practice in the Forties and that have proven to be highly influential on later pictures. Bordwell writes that Sturges’ two overt Home Front movies were his most conventional pictures in terms of narrative structure: The Great McGinty, for instance, uses an elaborate flashback structure and Sturges’ last major comedy 1947's Unfaithfully Yours (with Rex Harrison) fragments the story into flashbacks, false flashbacks, unreliable narration, and fantasy or dream sequences. Bordwell calls the structure of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek “point of crisis construction” – the movie begins with a point of crisis, politicians scrambling to address the “miracle” that has happened in the small-town; the film, then, flashes back from that point but ends by reverting to the point of crisis and, then, advancing to the denouement.
Sturges insisted that his lines be spoken, without improvisation, exactly as he wrote them. He directed by acting out the parts in the script for each of the performers, using voices mimicking the actors (and actresses) playing the roles required. He worked with a stock or repertoire company of mostly male character actors. On occasion, he playfully engages in self-referential imagery – the governor of the State in which Morgan’s Creek is located is played by Brian Donleavy, the crooked politician on-the-make in The Great McGinty – the governor has migrated from Sturges’ first important film released in 1940 to the later picture made in 1942, but released in 1943. (The Boss, a gangster in The Great McGinty played by Akim Tamiroff, also has a cameo in these scenes.) In the 1944 Hail the Conquering Hero!, Eddie Bracken, ostensibly a war hero, marches past a big poster on a siding for The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.
Raped in its Sleep
As noted above, James Agee said that The Miracle at Morgan's Creek was evidence that the Breen Office had been “raped in its sleep.” The Breen office was the Hollywood agency, devised by the industry, to self-censor its movies. This office was formed to administer the so-called Hayes Code.
In the early thirties, there was wide-spread outrage among some cultural pundits about the licentiousness allegedly promoted by early talking pictures. These so-called “Pre-code” films featured sexual promiscuity and depictions of criminal actions without adverse consequences to participants. In the so-named “Pre-Code” movies, there were unwed mothers, prostitutes, adultery, and lots of unpunished crime. Hollywood had been a favorite scape-goat with conservatives for many years and it was thought that the scandalous lives of the movie stars were also a bad influence on youth. Hollywood recognized that it would be better to police itself than to delegate this authority to the government – an enterprise which would have been constitutionally suspect in any event. According, Will Hayes, a former postmaster general for Woodrow Wilson, was appointed by industry leaders to devise and enforce a morality code applicable to Hollywood movies. Hayes was actually reasonably liberal and recognized that clamping down too hard on the industry would kill the goose that was laying, year after year, golden eggs. So Hayes engaged Joe Breen to write a code governing what could and could not be shown the motion pictures. The so-called Breen Office was supposed to administer the Code on behalf of the motion picture industry.
The Code was full of oddities – movies couldn’t show couples in bed together without one of them having a foot on the ground; swear words were banished as well as terms like “virgin” and “pregnancy” and there were a host of other prohibitions as well. Immediately, clever screenwriters set about finding ways to circumvent the Hayes Code. And, of course, there was no screenwriter more clever than Preston Sturges. Indeed, part of the comedy in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is Sturges’ ingenuity in subverting the Breen Office – this is an in-joke and subtext to the movie that would have been obvious in 1943 to anyone in the movie business.
Sturges movie is about a young woman who becomes intoxicated at a dance patriotically sponsored as solace for departing servicemen. The young woman has sex with some (or several) soldiers and ends up pregnant but without a marriage license or a known father for her child. Obviously, this subject matter would have been profoundly distasteful to the Breen Office and, in fact, there would have been no way to get a script approved on this topic. But Sturges fed his scenario to the Breen Office piecemeal, in six or seven page sections, and, so, the actual scope of the film’s subversion of Hollywood’s self-imposed censorship was not wholly visible until the movie was complete. Sturges’ eliminated alcohol from his screenplay, although suggesting that Trudy is, in fact, drunk – albeit “punch-drunk” from bonk on the head. (Everyone who meets Trudy immediately after the dance simply takes it for granted that she is intoxicated; she seems to have consumed spiked lemonade and champagne.) Her meretricious conduct with one, or more servicemen, is cloaked in the implication that she didn’t have sex until she was somehow legally married – as if a marriage to an underage (minor) girl who is very drunk would have somehow make this sexual activity more acceptable. In effect, Sturges taunts the Breen office with this scenario, mocks the war effort, and, for a good measure, inserts a strong element of blasphemy (Trudy gives “virgin birth” at Christmas) into the film. Critics give Sturges’ credit for hoodwinking the Breen Office, but, of course, the censors were complicit – movies are a money-making endeavor and, viewed in a skeptical light, the entire raison d’etre for the Code and the Office was to allow Hollywood to continue making money on salacious projects, albeit within certain approved limits.
“Canada demands a Recount”
This is the headline on one of the newspapers shown in the montage presented after Trudy’s septuplets are born. This allusion refers to the celebrated Dionne quintuplets born in rural Corbell, near Callendar in the Canadian province of Ontario. These towns are on the border with Quebec and the Dionne quints were born to French-speaking parents, apparently a poor family living on a farm in the country. The five identical girls were born in 1934 and would have about eight years old when The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek was made. All of these children survived their childhood, and, as of this writing, two of them remain alive.
The story of the Dionne quintuplets is extremely sordid and disheartening. Within a few days of their birth, local physicians had betrayed the parents into signing an agreement to exhibit their children at the Chicago World’s Fair. (Fortunes were made on the quintuplets but their parents and the girls themselves didn’t see any of this money.) The Canadian government was appalled that a major Canadian resource, the Dionne infants, seemed to be in danger of export to the United States. So the children were declared Wards of the Canadian State. (The government also made money on the children leasing them, as it were, to Hollywood where they appeared in three feature films between 1936 and 1938). A documentary about the girls showing their fifth birthday party, Five by Five, was nominated for a documentary Oscar in 1940. A special nursery and school was built for the children and this facility, in turn, became a major tourist attraction. Profits from this enterprise were paid to the quints’ enterprising pediatrician, Dr. Dafoe. Around the time that The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek was made, interest in the children was waning. Custody of the children was restored to the parents, whereupon the girls’ father promptly began sexually abusing them. (This wasn’t revealed until the 1990's).
The Dionne quintuplets were remarkable because they were identical and the first multiple birth of five children in which all infants survived.
Cannon fodder
In the context of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, the implications of Trudy’s multiple birth are disquieting. The first headline that Sturges flashes on the topic reads NATURE ANSWERS TOTAL WAR. The point, of course, is that Trudy has given birth to “a platoon” – all of the children are male. In the context of “total war”, they are cannon fodder. The Italians, Japanese, and Germans are shown to be distraught at Trudy’s fertility – the Americans are out-producing the Axis in the one resource fundamental to “total war”, that is, young men who can be slaughtered in battle. The viewer’s mind, even now at a remove eighty years, considers the marvelous birth as being propitious to the war effort – men killed, or maimed, in battle are replaced by babies born to be cogs in the military-industrial complex.
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