Set Your DVR!: February 2 - 9, 2009

Hayden Childs — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

This week has three movies to make your DVR (or, you know, you) happy! First you have a Preston Sturges sex romp straining against the Hays Code. Then a classic sci-fi version of The Tempest with Freudian overtones! And finally, the first third of an iconic samurai trilogy. Enjoy!

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, playing on TCM on Thursday, February 5 at 7 pm central/8 pm eastern. The Hays Code forbade movies in which unmarried people had biblical knowledge of each other, if you know what I mean, and I think you do (hint: I'm not talking about smiting). But Preston Sturges had an idea about a movie in which a small-town lass goes out for a few drinks with some soldiers on their way to WWII and winds up pregnant by one of them. The character is named Trudy Kockenlocker, and if that's not enough for a quick dirty joke, she's played by the hot-to-trot Betty Dutton. To slide under the Hays Code bar, she's had a quickie marriage to the guy. Unfortunately, she can't remember his name. Professional bundle-of-nerves Eddie Bracken stars as her small-town pal stuck in the friend zone, but who wants to be so much more.

Forbidden Planet, playing on TCM on Friday, February 6 at 7 am central/8 am eastern. Many of the sci-fi flicks of this period are about creeping Communism or mindless anti-Communism (as if sacrificing basic civil liberties to fight an idea is anything other than preposterous). In this one, political philosophies are nothing compared to the horrors of the psyche. It's an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest, starring Leslie Nielson in a dramatic (non-ironic, I mean) role, and it's a lot of fun.

Samurai 1: Musashi Miyamoto, playing on IFC on Saturday, February 7 at 7 am central/8 am eastern. This is the first of the Samurai trilogy, starring the always-amazing Toshiro Mifune as Musashi Miyamoto, one of the great swordsmen of Japanese legend. This is cinema at its most epic and iconic. If you watch this, be prepared to check back over the next two Saturdays for the next two parts, because the trilogy really must be seen as a whole.

The Movie Moment: The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944, Preston Sturges)

Paul Clark — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 20:00:00 GMT

For years, Hollywood’s Production Code was the last word in regulating the decency of American movies. If a movie’s subject matter, content, or intent didn’t meet with the approval of the Production Code Administration (PCA), a movie had to be tinkered with until it did. It was a formidable obstacle for filmmakers, and such limits forced them to get creative. This was especially true of Code-era comedies, which often hid dicey material just well enough by playing it for laughs.

For my money, no one did it more successfully than Preston Sturges, who made a string of hilarious, outrageous comedies during the 1940s, at the height of the PCA’s power. Sturges’ best work is full of questionable material that he somehow snuck past the censors- think the Freudian snakes of The Lady Eve, or the husband plotting his wife’s murder in Unfaithfully Yours. Most outlandish of all was his 1944 farce The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, which had so much risqué material that it’s a miracle it was made at all, let alone released.

How risqué, you ask? Look no further than the film’s premise. Betty Hutton plays young Trudy Kockenlocker (Kockenlocker!), who goes out dancing with some soldiers leaving for the war, only to have no recollection of what happened the next morning. She later discovers that not only did she get married, but she can’t even remember the groom’s name, aside from it being “something like… Ratzkywatzky.” Not only that, but she’s pregnant, so she enlists her hapless admirer, Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken) to help her out of her predicament. That’s just in the first half-hour or so. After that, it’s off to the races.

If Sturges’ inversion of the Biblical Christmas story seemed objectionable, that’s nothing compared to the film’s portrayal of pregnancy, a taboo subject under the PCA. The word “pregnant” wasn’t even uttered by a Hollywood release until 1953’s The Moon Is Blue. What’s amazing is how well Sturges navigates around his restrictions while getting his points across loud and clear. In the film’s final reel, Trudy is in her final days before giving birth. Unable to show her pregnant belly, Sturges instead films her obliquely, with the camera behind her head while she sits in a chair or outside a car while she sits in the backseat. Rather than denying Trudy’s condition, the camera angles are so contrived and awkward that they become a subversive joke unto themselves.

Yet what comes through most clearly in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is its warmth. A prevailing theme in Sturges’ films is what it means to do good, and Norval is one of his sweetest characters. He loves Trudy so much that he’ll suffer anything for her. But Trudy’s goodness is just as important. She makes some big mistakes, but she learns from them, and along with Norval’s unconditional love they make her a better person. It’s because of this that we care about these two crazy kids through all of the bizarre hairpin turns of the plot, leading up to the final miracle on Christmas Eve, the outcome of which I wouldn’t dream of spoiling for you.

Previous Movie Moment posts can be found here.

The Screengrab : eddie bracken

Set Your DVR!: February 2 - 9, 2009

The Movie Moment: The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944, Preston Sturges)