A Film Canon

The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek commences a more radical, if less consistent, period in Sturges' career, by transforming the comedy of remarriage into a comedy of bigamy. Not only does Trudy Knockenlocker (Betty Hutton) only recognise her desire for Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken) after an all-night binge that leaves her married and pregnant to a faceless soldier, but her use of an (unremembered) pseudonym makes remarriage an absolute necessity. At a certain level, this deconstruction of screwball conventions merely reinforces their profound affirmation of romance in the face of convention. Nevertheless, Sturges raises the comic disparity between Trudy's beauty and Norval's (supposed) ugliness to such a pitch that romance itself is poisoned by the cruel conflation of personality and appearance; or, alternatively, by the reduction of charisma to a mere extrapolation of physical gifts, rather than anything that might supervene them. At these moments, the film approaches Sullivan's Travels in its bitter self-revulsion, condensing the oppressiveness of a typecast star system into Norval's banal, pathetic, and ultimately self-fulfilling ruminations: "The older I get, the uglier I get...I guess a face like mine, you just can't grow out of it so easy...I really didn't blame you when you started looking at the personality kids with the Greek profiles." Similarly, Sturges pares the physical chaos that informs screwball back to its slapstick roots, drawing out its cruelty so as to suggest some deep, alarming violence texturing the comedy, and producing a series of pratfalls whose humour is ultimately subordinated to their rupturous reduction of characters to bodies. This culminates with the militaristic media frenzy that greets Trudy's birth of sextuplets ("Nature Answers Total War!...Platoon Born In Midwest!") - a miracle that, in Mayor McGinty's words, encapsulates "the biggest thing to happen to this state since we stole it from the Indians!"