The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1943)

 A young woman (Betty Hutton) wants to give departing servicemen a proper send-off, but her old fashioned dad (William Demarest) won’t have it. So, she uses the town dork (Eddie Bracken) as an alibi to get out of the house. She ditches him and doesn’t return until morning with no memory, and apparently married. And worse. She needs to further manipulate her dork friend to fix things.

A fan of Preston Sturges, I’ve long wanted to see this film and was happy when TCM finally ran it. When I started watching, I realized that I had seen at least part of it. By the time it was over, I realized that I had seen all of it. Recently. Now, this has happened before, but only to films I wasn’t particularly interested in and proved to be forgettable. This is a film that was on my radar for a long time and I truly enjoyed. I have no explanation. Does anyone else smell toast?

Norvel and Trudy, the two main characters, are charmingly ditzy. Betty was a rising star at the time and Eddie was an established comic actor, and they had good chemistry together. Unusual for comedies, there are long tracking shots of the two and the performances were spot on. Betty would go on to star in the second-worst best picture winner ever. William Demarest played the William Demarest character.

While the antics and performances are quite enjoyable, it’s a rather depressing story when you think about it. I can’t explain lest I spoil, so I will leave it there. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is a charming, well written, funny film with some excellent performances. It was a huge success and I'm quite shocked it got past the censors. AMRU 4.