New Picture

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (Paramount) is a little like taking a nun on a roller coaster. Its ordinary enough subject --the difficulties of a small-town girl, pregnant, without a husband--is treated with the catnip giddiness to be expected from Writer-Director Preston Sturges (The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve). The overall result is one of the most violently funny comedies, one of the most original, vigorous and cheerfully outrageous moving pictures that ever came out of Hollywood. The picture also has its faults--both as fun and as cinema.

Morgan's Creek is the home town of Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton), a daftly endearing innocent who gradually remembers one morning that she married a transient soldier the night before--his name was something, she recalls, like Private Ratzkywatzsky. Presently she also realizes that she is pregnant. Fond as she is of her widower Poppa (William Demarest), she knows better than to confide in him; he has the worst film temper since the twilight of the Keystone Cops. But her young sister Emily (Diana Lynn) knows precisely what Trudy must do. She must marry Norval before he knows what he is in for.

Norval (Eddie Bracken) is Trudy's unwanted steady, a poor stammering loon of a 4-F whose stupidity is excelled only by his utterly selfless devotion. As Trudy watches him gratefully writhing in her clutches, she begins for the first time to love him. His efforts to save her good name, fantastically inept and deeply touching, would melt much colder hearts than hers. At the picture's end Norval, through no doing of his own, is at once ridiculous, pitiful and a national hero. As he shows up in his splendid new uniform, flashbulbed, bewildered, happy, homely, still unaware of what is in store for him, he receives the brass-band salute aptly paraphrased as "AND the MONkey wrapped his TAIL around the FLAG POLE. . . ."

That salute is characteristic of Preston Sturges' treatment of a theme which might more normally interest Theodore Dreiser or some true-confessions Dumas. Sturges, like Rene Clair, has always understood the liberating power of blending comedy and realism, wild farce and cool intellect. But the best of the domestic and anarchic satire cannot be suggested on paper; it is too thoroughly cinematic. It reaches its perfection in William Demarest, whose performance is one of the few solid-gold pieces of screen acting in recent years. But chief credit for The Miracle must go to Sturges, who has given the slick, growing genteelism of U.S. cinema the roughest and healthiest shaking up it has had since the disease became serious.

The chief failures are his, too. Some of the fun is painfully unfunny, because it is like a joker who outroars his audience's reaction. Some of the pity is not pitiful because it is smashed before it has a chance to crystallize. Most of the finest human and comic potentialities of the story are lost because Sturges is so much less interested in his characters than in using them as hobbyhorses for his own wit. His good friend and master, Rene Clair, is near the heart of it when he says, "Preston is like a man from the Italian Renaissance: he wants to do everything at once. If he could slow down, he would be great; he has an enormous gift and he should be one of our leading creators. I wish he would be a little more selfish and worry about his reputation."

The life of Preston Sturges might read as dizzily as one of his own comedies if it were not, in essence, so intensely bitter. On his first day at school in Chicago, Preston rode a bicycle and wore a Greek chiton. The bicycle was his stepfather's influence--Solomon Sturges, stockbroker and socialite, was a champion cyclist and a good amateur baseball player. The Attic haberdashery was his mother's idea. Mary Dempsey, who changed her name to Beatricci D'Este and finally settled for Mary Desti, was the bosom friend of Isadora Duncan.

Reluctant Genius. Preston's mother was determined that he should be a genius. "I was never allowed," Sturges says, "to play with other kids. They wedged art into me from every side. I was dragged into every goddamn museum in the world." There were gay moments, but they usually stank of culture.

The effect of such training was predictable. "They did everything they could," he says, "to make me an artist, but I didn't want to be an artist. I wanted to be a good businessman like my father." He was accordingly delighted when, at 16, he became manager of the Deauville branch of Mary's Paris cosmetics firm. When the U.S. entered World War I he joined the Air Corps, served in Tennessee and Florida till the Armistice.

Young Mr. Edison. After the war, Sturges returned to the Maison Desti. He knew a good deal about cosmetics, invented a kissproof lipstick. His mother, in England with a fourth husband, was on the rocks again. She claimed the business; he handed it over and went to work as a free-lance inventor. By the time he was 30 he was about as flat a failure as a man of his age and background could be. Then his appendix ruptured, and saved his life.

Life Begins at 30. For six weeks, in a Chicago hospital, Sturges lay flat on his back. He emerged with an absolute determination to become a playwright, a no less absolute confidence in his ability. Sturges' second play, Strictly Dishonorable, which he wrote in six days, was a great Broadway comedy hit, running 69 weeks.

After three flops, Sturges went to Hollywood. For eight years he pestered producers to let him direct his own pictures; finally, after he had written 13 screen plays, Paramount's William Le Baron gave him his chance with The Great McGinty. This was the surprise hit of 1940. Some Hollywoodians even accepted Sturges' startling theory--that one man with a good head is better than any hundred men bumping heads.

Desti Rides Again. Sturges' brilliant, successful yet always deeply self-sabotaging films suggest a warring blend of the things he picked up through respect for his solid stepfather, contact with his strange mother, and the intense need to enjoy himself and to succeed which came from 30 years of misery and failure. From his life with his mother he would seem to have gotten not only an abiding detestation for the beautiful per se, the noble emotion nobly expressed, but also his almost corybantic intelligence. From Solomon Sturges, on the other hand, Preston may have derived his exaggerated respect for plain success, which leaves him no patience towards artists of integrity who fail at the box office. The combination might explain his matchless skill in producing some of the most intoxicating bits of nihilism the screen has known, but always at the expense of a larger excellence.

Meanwhile Sturges has two pictures waiting in the can. One is called Hail the Conquering Hero. The other, Great Without Glory, is an adaptation of Rene Fueloep-Miller's Triumph Over Pain, which was the story of anesthesia. It is still the story of anesthesia--but it is also a Sturges farce. It remains to be seen what Sturges might do with really major material, such a Seven Against Thebes, or the Oberammergau Players.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.