The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943)
QFS No. 3 - The invitation for May 13, 2020
Preston Sturges is one of my favorite American filmmakers of the pre- and early post-war era. His Sullivan’s Travels (1941) and Hail The Conquering Hero (1944) are exceptional works of writing and subtle-to-overt social criticism through satire – especially during the studio system era. A handful of us were fortunate to catch Hail The Conquering Hero in the theater here in LA for our predecessor Wednesday Night Film Society get together at the New Beverly Cinema several years ago.
The Miracle at Morgan’s Creek has been on my “to watch” list for some time, so I figured let me use this opportunity in quarantine to encourage everyone to embrace their primal love of black and white cinema. Also this is probably the exact opposite type of film than the previous week. (We’re going to swing back and forth a lot with these selections!)
Join us if you can – details to follow.
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943) Directed by Preston Sturges
Reactions and Analyses:
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943) is a surprisingly subversive film. At the center of the story is Trudy (Betty Hutton) who is pregnant and doesn’t know who the father is. But she knows it’s a soldier because she was at a wild farewell party for a group of soldiers heading off to fight in World War II and had hit her head on a chandelier. She believes she married a soldier but doesn’t even know his last name for sure so they can’t find him.
Just stopping there - this is extraordinary. Think about 1943 and 1944 when this film is released by Paramount Pictures. How could a major movie studio release a film with this borderline blasphemous plot during the height of World War II when the nation was mobilized in unwavering support for the war effort and American soldiers conscripted to fight overseas? The premise suggests that a woman was so blackout drunk at a party with soldiers, enjoying the company of one or more of them, then got pregnant and has to figure out what to do now.
Throw in the hapless Norval (Eddie Bracken) who throws on a uniform as if to solve the problem as they fake a marriage, where things continue to go awry, and you take it from tragedy to comedy really quickly, with moral questions at its center.
The only filmmaker of that time - especially for a comedy - who could credibly pull this off is Preston Sturges. A true auteur before the word ever came into being even in France, Sturges was writing and directing his own films with his own unique voice. You can look no further than the terrific Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) from this same year (also starring Eddie Bracken) which skewers the idea of war heroism. There, Eddie Bracken’s “Woodrow” is discharged from the military after only a month, but a small lie - that he fought abroad - spirals out of control as everyone treats him as a returning hero. He’s suddenly the toast of his home town, rekindling an old love, even picked to run for mayor.
Here, in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, there’s a similar theme - this idea that soldiers are unassailable demigods and not fallible humans. That war and military service is the measure of greatness.
By the end of the film, Trudy gives birth to six boys in a truly wild delivery room sequence that features a harried Norval and a frantic doctor. The news makes it around the world - both the fact that someone gave birth to six children but also that they were all, miraculously, boys. This is portrayed as a sign of American virility and prowess, of American might and righteousness. It’s wacky, it’s nonsensical, and the time frame of it all makes no sense. But it’s the perfect conclusion to a Sturges film.
One QFSer brought up that this is all tongue-in-cheek. Sturges is saying that all of this American moral superiority is nonsense and deserving of ridicule. Or at the very least, deserving of at least a mirror to show ourselves how shallow and self-delusional it all really is. Sturges’ tone borders on sarcastic, but it’s not sarcasm exactly. It’s farce - social criticism covered up by farce. Whether it worked on that level for audiences at the time is perhaps unclear now, but it certainly clear upon watching in 2020. The brilliance of Sturges here, and in all his work, is how it endures even though it was meant to probe the cultural and social norms of the time.
