El asombro del siglo

I first saw "Miracle" during WW2, sitting on an emptied bomb crate in a field where Special Services had set up a screen. We soldiers howled with laughter. Since then I have seen it a few more times and I enjoy it more than ever.

Although I've always preferred Palm Beach Story this is my 2nd favourite Preston Sturges film (Lady Eve 3rd). It still makes me hoot with laughter or bring tears to my eyes by turns even though I know it's basically only satirical screwball comedy. The problem is that anybody watching this who doesn't know anything at all about Hollywood censorship and the Hays Office is likely to be very puzzled by it all and hardly understand it. The tortuous plot was solely meant to circumvent and sneer at the prevailing censorship enforcement, whilst simultaneously maintaining the standard decorum expected from media in 1942-44. Otherwise we might have been treated (among many other things) to coitus scenes with Ratzkywatzky, Officer Kockenlocker comically swearing his head off or at the very least a shot of Trudy's belly at Christmas. Nowadays with the relentless progress of acceptable "taste" none of this matters - we are not spared the littlest thing!

The main actors give it their best and play it with gusto: live-wire Betty Hutton and 4F Eddie Bracken as the simple young lovers who don't find it so simple, Diana Lynn as her sidekick cynical 14 yo sister, but especially William Demarest who turned in his finest knockabout and farcically violent performance here - at 50, too. I think it also helps to have seen Star Spangled Rhythm with Hutton and Bracken really "enjoying" themselves in a ... more light-hearted way before seeing this. My favourite bits are the scenes where Norval and Trudy are preparing to leave home and get "married", both of them joyfully stuttering away.

The Production Code was ridiculously strict - I've even thought it was designed by a bunch of perverts - but it at least provided some kind of discipline to all concerned. It's a discipline that is completely missing from todays films, except for my personal discipline in avoiding most of them. This is a wonderful film, the old story told cleverly and differently about simple people in Hicksville having fun and paying the price. Even only 2/3 years later Sturges would have done it differently, but along with Capra's "Arsenic and old lace" this has got to be one of the best of the many tombstones over the grave of the Hays Office there is.

Preston Sturges is often referred to as "the king of the screwball comedy," the acknowledged master of writing and directing this tricky variant combining rapid-fire repartee dialogue with the occasional slapstick pratfall. A lot easier to describe in words than to execute on a movie screen. Equally interesting is what Hollywood and the Hays Code allowed him to get away with, as in this above-average example starring Betty Hutton, Eddie Bracken, Diana Lynn as Betty's sister, & William Demarest as her cantankerous dad. Against her father's wishes, and w/enabling assistance from Bracken and Lynn, Hutton goes to a send off for departing soldiers, accidentally gets drunk, is married to one of the soldiers in an impromptu ceremony, and then promptly forgets which soldier was the groom. But the more scandalous part back in 1943, when this movie was made, was the revelation that this single-night soirée has resulted in Hutton's pregnancy. Yowza! The best aspects of the story here are 1) that nobody thinks of Hutton's character as a tramp or floozy, and 2) that the whole situation in which she finds herself is just considered wacky and doesn't change Bracken's genuine and long-standing love and admiration for her. I can't believe this plotline got to theater screens virtually unchanged from Sturges original screenplay, which went on to be nominated for an Oscar. Like so many of Preston Sturges' screwball comedies, this one's right in there over home plate. 8/10.

From the very start they're off and running. Even under the opening credits cast members are seen frantically gesticulating and flailing. And the movie has hardly begun.

So what's to be done with the next 98 minutes, if one begins climatically sweating and pulsating? Ease up the pace a bit to allow viewer to catch his breath?

Not Director Sturges: he continues to plow through this comedy at breakneck speed, as though any repose might prove fatal.

We get two super energetic starts--Bracken and Hutton--and a cast of obedient supports obeying the eager director's every frenetic command. We end with one of the screwiest screwball comedies of the forties.

This film has acquired a devoted following of supporters who find "Morgan's Creek" very funny, along with a goodly number of detractors, who see it as an essentially strained and bloated one-joke yarn.

As usual, Sturges makes sharp social comments along the way and handles large groups with Capraesque skill. But that he manages to maintain his unrelentingly breathless pace throughout the shoot may be the real miracle of Morgan's Creek.

Great movies are movies you can't bear to see end, no matter how many times you've seen 'em. They play new the second, third, tenth time around; catching the light at angles you'd never seen them in before, gaining richness and profundity in familiar details while throwing never-noticed subtleties into sudden high relief. They awaken you to reserves of emotion inside yourself that are plumbed so rarely, you'd almost forgotten you had them in you all along. They are one-to-one experiences - even if you see a film like Preston Sturges' MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK in a packed revival house laughing uproariously en masse, you can only share a surface pleasure with those strangers: the deeper joys of this movie are yours and yours alone, shocking you into an awareness of how potent the alchemy of a great film can be, no matter how often you've felt that seismic shift with other great films. Even when you encounter an idiotic review that completely, callously, misses the whole point, you can't even get angry - how could you? A STAR WARS or Tarantino fan clucking terms like 'dated' or 'foolish' at a Preston Sturges movie is too pitiable a wretch to deserve actual scorn: maybe one day they'll figure it out, if they're lucky. MIRACLE turns out to be aptly titled, as this heady, unduplicable blend of slapstick, sitcom, surrealism and sharply observed slice-of-life manages to embody WW2-era popular entertainment while standing as far apart and above all its contemporaries as is humanly possible. The genius of Sturges was not that he ran end-runs around the censors but that he subverted them from the safest place to do so, deep within the fortress of the Production Code. The story of a small-town girl who finds herself both married and unmarried at the same time - but DEFINITELY pregnant in either case - is deliriously funny and brimming with great heart and honest sentiment, yet it's never less than a devastating indictment of the kind of mean-spirited provincialism that brought the Code into being in the first place. Rather than single out exemplary performances, I direct you instead to the complete cast-list (for the mark of a Preston Sturges movie is a wealth of expert actors, each blessed with scenes and dialogue devised to play to their respective strengths). Thus, the Esther Howards and Porter Halls shine as indelibly in small roles as the leads do - here, Bracken, Hutton, Lynn & Demarest, all inspired. If you haven't yet seen this unforgettable jewel, beat a path to wherever it is you have to beat a path to, and rectify the situation immediately: you should be ready for your second viewing about three minutes after the end credits run.