From the library: “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek”

A miraculously mad masterpiece. The marvel of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is how the film ever got made in the first place. This onslaught against American morals in small towns, against the wartime romances of servicemen, against just about everything that the country held sacred during WWII was reckless, exaggerated, and very funny.

Preston Sturges was at his irreverent best with his screenplay and direction of this most unlikely story. Betty Hutton is Trudy Kockenlocker, a man-crazy blonde who lives with her bitchy sister Emmy (Diana Lynn) and her policeman father (William Demarest). She gets drunk during one wild, passionate night with a soldier, whom she thinks she may have married, and becomes pregnant. The soldier, who she recalls is named something like "Ratsky-Watsky," vanishes, and since being pregnant in a small town without being married is the worst thing that can happen in a girl’s life, Trudy’s sometime bank clerk boyfriend Norval (Eddie Bracken) is tapped to be the father of her child. In one mix-up after another, Novral winds up being sought by authorities for impersonating a soldier, forgery, corrupting the morals of a minor, kidnapping and robbery. It looks bad for the young couple, and the only thing that can save them is a miracle. Of course, one does.

Every role is handled with deftness, and Sturges even gets in a few holdovers from an earlier success, The Great McGinty, by having Brian Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff stop by for a few well-chosen words. The idea of having squeaky-clean Hutton shown as a (shudder) girl with loose morals was a sensation that somehow eluded the censor’s scissors. Some say that the plot managed to escape snipping because the picture was so funny that no one could take it seriously, but the truth is that this movie kept a tight grip on reality and that’s what made it so hilarious.

The manic Hutton, always an acquired taste, here gets a hilarious part that requires the frantic energy of a whirling dervish on speed. She was never better, and the same goes for the nervous Bracken, the grouchy Demarest and the wisecracking Lynn. Sturges, having begun his uninterrupted string of comic masterpieces in 1940 with McGinty, reached a peak in satirical zaniness with this one. Remade (sort of) in 1958 as Rock-a-bye Baby.

The 25 Best Films of 1944

1. Double Indemnity
2. Ivan the Terrible, Part One
3. Meet Me in St. Louis
4. To Have and Have Not
5. Laura
6. A Canterbury Tale
7. Henry V
8. THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN’S CREEK
9. The Woman in the Window
10. Jane Eyre
11. Going My Way
12. Hail, the Conquering Hero
13. Since You Went Away
14. National Velvet
15. Wilson
16. Gaslight
17. Arsenic and Old Lace
18. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
19. The Uninvited
20. Murder My Sweet
21. Lifeboat
22. Mr. Skeffington
23. The Lodger
24. This Happy Breed
25. The Way Ahead