Daily Archives: Friday, March 4, 2016

  • The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Preston Sturges (1944)

    The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek has a fine plot and includes plenty of nice bits but it’s too frenetic for me.   The dominance of physical comedy in the film probably explains why Preston Sturges cast in the leading roles comic performers – as distinct from straight actors skilled in comedy – but the insistent playing of Eddie Bracken and Betty Hutton seems one-dimensional compared with the work of Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in earlier Sturges movies.  This is the first of his films that I’ve seen in which Sturges looks to be reworking earlier successes.  Brian Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff reprise their roles from The Great McGinty in cameo appearances in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.  The pratfalls come thick and fast because Sturges wants them to, rather than according to the character-centred rationale that makes Fonda’s mishaps in The Lady Eve so effective.  A cow wandering unhelpfully into a family kitchen in Morgan’s Creek echoes the horse that memorably pokes his nose into Fonda’s proposal of marriage to ‘Lady Eve’ Stanwyck.  (To be fair, the cow is still pretty funny.)

    The story, set in a small town in Ohio, is topical.  Eddie Bracken’s Norval Jones, a bank clerk, has an inferiority complex, after trying and failing to be accepted for military service in World War II.  Norval is crazy about glamorous Trudy Kockenlocker, who works in a local record store.  The armed forces deal Norval another blow when Trudy declines his invitation to a movie show in order to attend a farewell party for a group of soldiers about to go off to war.  Trudy’s crotchety, over-protective father (William Demarest), the local police constable, puts the kibosh on his elder daughter’s attending the party.  She goes out with Norval instead but immediately asks to borrow his car, drives to the party alone and leaves him at the picture-house.  Next day, after dancing and drinking the night away, Trudy discovers a ring on her wedding finger; she’s far from clear how it got there but thinks it might have something to do with a ‘z’ in his name.  Soon afterwards, Trudy discovers she’s pregnant too. Most of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is devoted to the desperate and botched attempts to manage the heroine’s difficult situation.  (It’s remarkable that the film got past the Hays Office intact.)   In her hour of need, Trudy again turns to Norval.  Papa Kockenlocker’s efforts to sort things out succeed only in putting his prospective son-in-law in jail.

    Trudy and Norval are eventually married, thanks to the intervention of Governor McGinty and the Boss, who want to exploit the publicity and commercial potential of ‘the miracle of Morgan’s Creek’.  The miracle is that Trudy gives birth to sextuplets, all boys.  Sturges inserts a newsreel montage of how the world, including Nazi Germany, receives the amazing news.  The montage includes a newspaper headline that the Canadian premier has cast doubt on the story.  You need to know the history to get the joke.  In the mid-1940s, Canada boasted the world’s only surviving quintuplets: the Dionnes – all girls – born in 1934.  The first surviving sextuplets weren’t born until 1968 (in England).  In the film’s final scene, Norval is introduced to the babies he hasn’t fathered but whose father he will be.  Evidently the last to be told about the multiple birth, he’s not surprisingly overcome but a closing intertitle assures us that:

    ‘Norval recovered and became increasingly happy for, as Shakespeare said: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.”‘

    That epilogue, although it’s witty, feels like a relative admission of failure on the part of Preston Sturges.  In The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story, he doesn’t need to rely on verbal postscript to explain the happy ending:  he realises it on screen.  The Miracle of Morgan Creek is thinner in other ways too.  In the first half of the story, Trudy repeatedly and outrageously exploits the good nature of eager-to-please-her Norval but she then falls in love with him.  Unlike in The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story, there’s no sting in the tail to the designing woman seeing the error of her ways.

    Betty Hutton makes a wonderful opening appearance, as Trudy mimes to ‘The Bell in the Bay’, to an audience of soldiers in the record store.  The song, written by Sturges for the film, is sung on the disc Trudy’s playing behind the counter by a basso profundo (to put it mildly).  In most of what follows, Hutton switches rather mechanically between giddy effervescence and tearful despair.   The tireless Eddie Bracken is a very resourceful clown but I have to be honest that he got on my nerves.  In a larger role than Sturges usually provides him with, William Demarest gives the best performance:  the sustained acerbity of the exchanges between Papa Kockenlocker and his precociously cynical younger daughter (Diana Lynn) gives the action repeated shots in the arm.   Porter Hall is first rate as the Justice of the Peace who conducts the quickly annulled marriage between Trudy and Norval impersonating the unknown soldier with a ‘z’ in his name.  Sturges’s illustrations of local frames of mind – jostling for position within the petty officialdom of Morgan’s Creek, the townspeople’s appetite for scandal and thinking the worst of each other – are excellent.

    Manny Farber, in his enthusiastic review of the film in February 1944, described The Miracle of Morgan Creek as Preston Sturges’s ‘most consciously Mack Sennett-modernized, and his most entertaining film’.  In the last paragraph of his review, Farber wrote as follows:

    ‘There is a catch to all this.  While Sturges forces his roughhouse as fast as he can from one gag to another, somewhere very far and very faint is the story – the movie is in other words hollow.  It is a business completely of surface and you are always conscious of both its lack of insides and the extreme forcing that goes on.  … [The] gags are seldom the natural product of the type of character involved, but are set-ups that the character is pushed headlong into.  There is always in a Sturges film the feeling that he is above most of his comedy effects and that he is stooping quite far to make use of a comedy of which he realizes the entertainment value, as well as the fact that he realizes that a more, profound devastating effect (which he is more capable of in movies than anyone I know) is impossible in Hollywood and slapstick is a formula to rest comfortably in.  … Everything comes out extremely well because he has an amazing talent for comedy and moving pictures …’

    I don’t agree that there is always in a Preston Sturges film the feeling that Farber describes but his words are a perfect description of The Miracle of Morgan Creek and of why I enjoyed it less than the other Sturges movies I’ve so far seen.

    1 March 2016

  • Harold and Maude

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Hal Ashby (1971)

    A large, pretty youthful turnout in NFT1 and Pauline Kael says that the film, right from the start, was a cult success with young filmgoers.  I remember when it first came out but retained in my mind not much more than that its treatment of the relationship between a teenage boy and an elderly woman was daring.  It’s stayed high on a list of films I’ve meant to get around to seeing for the best part of 40 years so I probably shouldn’t complain that I found it a shocking disappointment.  The Wikipedia entry displays a poster for the film with the strapline ‘His [Harold’s] Hangups are Hilarious!’  I found Harold’s repeated ‘suicide attempts’ tedious but what’s startling about the presentation of the boy’s morbidity in this supposedly ‘dark’ film is how shallow it is – it’s played just for laughs, even though I couldn’t supply any.  In a similar way, the controversial geriatric-adolescent relationship is largely neutralised by the fact that Bud Cort, as Harold, has no sexual presence and, to a lesser extent, by the fact that Ruth Gordon, although she was in her early seventies when she played Maude, is well preserved.   And while the film seems to be anti-stereotyping in what it says about the two main characters as potential sexual partners, the character of Maude is in other respects familiar:  the fact that she’s a free spirit of a decidedly non-conformist kind isn’t enough to conceal the tiredness of the idea of an old person with a seize-the-day approach to life.  The attempts to get laughs out of her vigorously delinquent behaviour are condescendingly ageist.

    I kept wondering whether the film, even if feels lame now, might have seemed subversive when it first appeared but I can’t think this is likely.  Harold and Maude, written by Colin Higgins (who subsequently had a brief career as a director – Foul Play, Nine To Five, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas) is dark only on the surface.   When the prospect of going deeper occasionally looms up (when the camera picks up a concentration camp number stamped on Maude’s arm, for example), the film quickly recoils.    It may be an expression of the countercultural spirit sweeping through American films of the time but it’s ‘anti-establishment’ in an automatic way and it panders to, without challenging, a youth audience.  Military men, the police, a Catholic priest, and a psychoanalyst – the usual suspects – are caricatures that, by 1971, were surely predictable (and were surely lampooned more imaginatively) as such.  The 2008 audience at BFI still reacted as if this was enduring trenchant satire.    Later in the decade, Hal Ashby (whose second feature this was) proved himself, with The Last Detail and Shampoo, a fine and sensitive director of actors and of comedy but neither gift is in evidence here.

    Ruth Gordon has the comic self-confidence and distinctiveness to keep things going but she lacks interpretative (and vocal) light and shade.   Bud Cort’s Harold certainly looks cartoonishly remarkable – the cadaverously lanky body, the bloodless complexion and exophthalmic gaze all seem right for the macabre Harold, but only on an Addams family level.   It’s probably a relief that Cort, because he’s not able to suggest a living human being, can’t get across what appears the sentimental concluding message of Harold and Maude – that Maude enables Harold to move from an obsession with death to an embrace of life – but it’s still uncomfortable to watch Cort because he’s so inadequate to the task in hand.   Harold’s cold, egocentric mother is played, with characteristic overemphasis and knowing assurance, by Vivian Pickles.    Cyril Cusack is wasted in a one-scene cameo as the artist whose model Maude is.  The wet, vaguely spiritual songs are by Cat Stevens.

    11 December 2008

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