The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (Preston Sturges, 1943)

Diana Lynn, William Demarest, Betty Hutton, and Eddie Bracken
in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek

Cast: Betty Hutton, Eddie Bracken, William Demarest, Diana Lynn, Porter Hall, Emory Parnell, Al Bridge, Julius Tannen, Victor Potel, Brian Donlevy, Akim Tamiroff. Screenplay: Preston Sturges. Cinematography: John F. Seitz. Art direction: Hans Dreier, Ernst Fegté. Film editing: Stuart Gilmore. Music: Charles Bradshaw, Leo Shuken.

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is one of the funniest films ever made, but it's my least favorite Preston Sturges movie. That's because it leans more heavily on wackiness than on wit. I have to admire how skillfully Sturges managed to hoodwink the censors -- could anyone else have managed to name a character, let alone one who mysteriously gets pregnant, Trudy Kockenlocker? The sheer audacity and the skill of the story's construction are breathtaking. But it's just a little too loud for my taste, which is partly the fault of casting Betty Hutton. Sturges was a director who could get astonishingly funny performances out of serious actresses like Barbara Stanwyck and Claudette Colbert, but casting the uninhibited Hutton as Trudy seems to kick the film up a notch too high. Still, the movie has one of my boyhood crushes, Diana Lynn, to bring a sly note to her role as Trudy's wisecracking kid sister, and every moment William Demarest is on the screen, steam coming out of his ears, is welcome.