The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
'People aren't as evil-minded as they were when you were a soldier, Papa,' purrs 14-year-old Emmy (Diana Lynn) to her dimly suspicious father (William Demarest), though certainly she must know better
Reviewed by Spencer Parsons, Fri., Sept. 23, 2005
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
Paramount Home Video, $14.99
"People aren't as evil-minded as they were when you were a soldier, Papa," purrs 14-year-old Emmy (Diana Lynn) to her dimly suspicious father (William Demarest), though certainly she must know better. After all, she's the immoral center of Preston Sturges' most brazenly evil-minded film, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), a sunny wartime satire concerning one Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton), whose overenthusiastic support of the troops lands her in the maternity ward.That the Production Code's enforcers changed Emmy's line from "dirty-minded" to "evil-minded" seems apt for this healthy reminder that people are as filthy now as they were then and probably ever will be. Mired in the details of the law's letter, the guardians of virtue neglected its spirit, and a merely dirty movie fell away to reveal a near-blasphemous one, marshaling all the authority of middle-American Values, Patriotism, Love, the Law, and even Christmas to sanctify its not-quite-virgin birth. Just considering how they allowed the heroine's pornographic surname, one can't help agreeing with James Agee that "the Hays office must have been raped in its sleep."
But it's the giddy convolutions to render any immorality legal and any illegality moral that deliver on what Manny Farber referred to as the title's promise of a "hashish-eater's vision of beatific American splendor." Of course Trudy isn't an unwed mother; she just can't remember who she married, so it'll take bigamy to keep her an honest woman. Enter Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken), a dweeb who can't get drafted, who should make the perfect papa-patsy ... until Trudy falls in love with the guy and so can't bear to ask for what he's all too eager to give.
As with our own South Park, half the shock lies in the characters' unfailingly sweet earnestness. Even the pragmatically corrupt Emmy possesses a brutal sincerity that could give Eric Cartman a run for his money. That cockeyed exuberance helps make the film some kind of apotheosis for Sturges' rogue's gallery of dilapidated character actors, as gnarled bit-players literally crowd out anyone other than Hutton who might resemble a star. Demarest gets one of his finest opportunities to sputter and rage as Trudy's father, while rubbery, potato-faced Bracken essays what might be Hollywood's greatest bizarro-world romantic lead until Bud Cort came along, and even Hutton is subversively forced to the level of warped vaudeville seaminess, lip-synching to a basso profundo or cutting a daft rug in her bedroom before hitting the town to give the boys something to fight for.
In the end, whether you read the titular miracle as either a tribute to our fighting men's sexual potency or a bottomlessly smutty (if biologically dubious) wheeze about how many soldiers Trudy "married," Sturges drops all responsibility in your lap. As Emmy would say: "You have a mind like a swamp."
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