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DVD Miracle of Morgan's Creek
During World War II, Hollywood's patriotic duty was to shoot stirring dramas and good-hearted comedies that celebrated America's brave soldiers and honored their loyal, virtuous wives and girlfriends. Which goes a long way toward explaining why this delirious Preston Sturges farce, filmed in 1943 at the height of the war effort (and of its director's powers), was delayed for a year while Paramount executives wrestled with Sturges's irreverence: in Morgan's Creek, the writer-director tweaked those stereotypes with his tale of Trudy Kockenlocker, a small-town girl who only wants to send our boys off with a smile. That she does, but she wakes up after an all-night party with vague memories of a dubious wedding and soon finds herself pregnant.
Trudy, played by the ebullient Betty Hutton, is wholesome, sexy, and something of a ditz, in contrast to Sturges's usual savvy heroines (represented instead by Trudy's teenaged younger sister, played by Diana Lynn). Trudy's savior is would-be boyfriend Norval, played to apoplectic perfection by the rubber-faced Eddie Bracken, who was never better than in this wide-eyed, pratfall-happy performance as the weary but loyal draft reject who stands by his girl. As Trudy's father, Sturges regular William Demarest likewise achieves a series of comic peaks as the exasperated and increasingly desperate Officer Kockenlocker.
Like Sturges's other Bracken-Demarest vehicle, the equally fine Hail, the Conquering Hero, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek was unique among wartime movies for its satirical sting and unblinking eye for hypocrisy on the home front. It's also enormous fun, a comedic romp that epitomizes Sturges's kinetic, high-speed style. --Sam Sutherland
A smalltown goodtime girl named Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton) goes off with a group of soldiers before they're sent off to war; the next morning she has vague memories of marrying one of them--someone, she says, like a name like "Ratzskywatzsky"--but with no memory of who exactly or where to find him. Soon after she finds out she's pregnant, and pressures the 4-F boy next door (Eddie Bracken) to help her out of her predicament.
All Preston Sturges comedies are worth your time if only because they all manage to be so funny while also being so innovative from a narrative perspective: Sturges loved playing with stories within stories, and yet does it so simply and hilariously as only to enhance the story's pleasure. (The framing device of the governor hearing the news and sorting all the problems out at the end as deus ex machina seems like a comic trick borrowing from Moliére.) But the story also broke tremendous ground by dint of its subject matter, which only barely got past the Hays Code censors; if you're familiar with the films of the time, the fact that Private Ratzskywatzsky never appears by the story's end to reclaim Trudy or their issue will seem astonishing. (All the same, the film was a huge hit.)
The film has much going for it besides Sturges's direction and writing. Not the least of these is Betty Hutton, who got perhaps the best role she ever had as the overenthusiastic Trudy. Hutton is all but forgotten today, but she was one of the few stars of Broadway musical comedy who made a very successful transition to Hollywood. Unlike Ethel Merman or Zero Mostel, whose enormous theatrical energies seemed artificial for the screen, Hutton succeeded because her over-the-top desperation seemed at its best (as here) incredibly sincere, and so her funniest moments are when she gives way so mercurially to her change of feelings with such zest and extremity. One of my favorite moments is when her father forbids her to go out to the dance with the soldiers; within a moment she goes from utter elation to blank depression, and she walks up the stairs with such disappointment in her spine that she's deeply endearing. Eddie Bracken's nervous nerdish comedy has aged less well than Hutton's hyperenthusiasm, perhaps, and the film suffers from its somewhat patronizing vision of smalltown life. (Sturges's comedies work best when he is making fun of sophisticates rather than just rubes, as in SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS or THE PALM BEACH STORY--he's at his best when he shows the wealthy and privileged to be just as apt towards enacting or being taken in by utterly harebrained schemes as is the middle class.) But the film has two fantastic assets in William Demarest as Trudy's crotchety father and Diana Lynn doing her funny specialty at adolescent knowingness as Trudy's incredibly sane younger sister. There's a great slapstick bit Sturges works up that whenever Lynn sasses her father Demarest tries to give her a flying kick in the pants, which he invariably mistimes so that he falls flat on his back.
Excellent movie
I loved this movie!! I watched it twice on television the other day! Eddie Bracken was extremely funny! I met and worked with Mr. Bracken in 1991 when he was in Houston in the Houston Grand Opera production of Babes in Toyland.
I will not go into detail of the actors and plot of the movie. I think everyone knows that.
Preston Sturges was a genius! I also love The Palm Beach Story!
"Six! All Boys! Six!"
Wonderful trigger-happy, off-the-wall comedy by Preston Sturges about a girl (Betty Hutton) who goes to a USO pary one night and learns later that sometime during the night she got married - and pregnant - but doesn't know who the husband/father is. Town schmo Eddie Bracken wants to marry her, despite the mess she's in, and she agrees - only that would be bigamy. They have a plan, of course, which backfires in a thousand hilarious ways.
All members of the Sturges Stable are present, and everyone is superb - especially William Demerest as Hutton's father. The "miracle" turns out to be sextuplets, which, in its way, solves the problems. Crude at times in the typical Sturges manner, but top-notch all the way. [Perhaps hard to believe today, but the picture was withheld for a year for censorship problems. Some consider it a miracle it made it to the screen at all; the Hays Office must have been out to lunch when this came up for review.]
Among the earliest writers to set his sights on the director's chair, Preston Sturges brought a frank, unsentimental view of the war between the sexes to his mid-'40s features that exemplify his style, as demonstrated in this prescient 1942 gem. Architect Tom Jeffers (Joel McCrea) and his wife, Gerry (Claudette Colbert), further refine the archetypal Sturges couple--the male embodying strength, idealism, and a certain naivete, the female ultimately stronger, smarter, and (as revealed early on in an astonishing speech by Colbert) clearer-eyed and more pragmatic about the subtext of sex. This giddy shaggy-dog story follows the couple's split, and Gerry's subsequent flight to Palm Beach. This head-snapping frolic is paced by double-entendres and lampooning looks at the very rich, with... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Claudette Colbert - Joel McCrea Director(s): Preston Sturges DVD Release Date: Released the 01 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Screwball comedy was practically invented by this classic Howard Hawks picture, a breathless farce with not an ounce of sentimentality. John Barrymore, in magnificent form, plays egomaniacal Broadway producer Oscar Jaffe, who molds his latest protégé, Mildred Plotka, into elegant thee-a-tuh star Lily Garland (Carole Lombard). The last hour of the picture has Oscar and Lily, now on the outs, battling each other on the Chicago-to-New York train. These two marvelous creatures are quintessential Hawks characters, figures of pure style who can't exist without the adrenaline and spark so amply supplied by the Hecht-MacArthur script. Hawks's giddyup pacing anticipates Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, and his deployment of character actors (notably Walter Connolly and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): John Barrymore - Carole Lombard Director(s): Howard Hawks DVD Release Date: Released the 22 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Fans of classic movie musicals will be in heaven with Astaire & Rogers Collection, Vol. 1, featuring the DVD debut of five films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the quintessential dancing duo. The two gems of the set are Top Hat (1935), generally considered their definitive movie, and Swing Time (1936), which many consider their most enjoyable. Follow the Fleet (1936), Shall We Dance (1937), and The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) fill out the set, each with its own charms.
"The love impulse in man," says a psychiatrist in Bringing Up Baby, "frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict." That's for sure. For a primer on the rules and regulations of the classic screwball comedy, which throws love and conflict into close proximity, look no further. A straight-laced paleontologist (Cary Grant) loses a dinosaur bone to a dog belonging to free-spirited heiress Katharine Hepburn. In trying to retrieve said bone, Grant is drawn into the vortex surrounding the delicious Hepburn, which becomes a flirtatious pas de deux that will transform both of them. Director Howard Hawks plays the complications as a breathless escalation of their "love impulse," yet the movie is nonetheless romantic for all its speed. (Hawks's His Girl Friday, also with Grant, goes... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): William Powell DVD Release Date: Released the 01 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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