(thank you, lachambreverte!)  

“Some are born great,
some achieve greatness,
and some have greatness thrust upon them.”
Wm. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (Act II, Scene IV)

Sure, that title may make it sound a little too much like some overly pompous religious themed film, but director Preston Sturges’ great, outrageous 1944 comedy is still one of the more hilariously subversive Hollywood movies of that era when the Hays Code was clamping down hard on movies and forcing directors to come up with all sorts of means to get around some pretty stupid and strict rules. For some reason, those censors must have been asleep at the wheel as The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is still one of the funniest movies ever made, period. If your eyebrow is hovering above your head like a skeptical cartoon character, go rent or yank out from your movie collection Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up and watch this afterward. I bet you’re laughing harder at the older film, so pony up five cents now and mail it my way after you lose that bet…

Still not convinced, are we? Well here’s a bit of the plot to shake and stir your pot upstairs. Betty Hutton plays Trudy Kockenlocker (!), a small town gal who likes enlisted men quite a bit too much and Eddie Bracken plays Norval Jones, a sad sack who’s 4-F (unfit for military service), but hopelessly in love with Trudy. Norval can’t get her attention other than on a friendly basis, as Trudy is constantly on the prowl not and not simply out of patriotic duty, mind you. When she gets herself pregnant and maybe married after a night she doesn’t remember (one of the funnier sequences in the film where she’s literally “knocked up” into a rather unusually shaped disco ball-like ceiling fixture during one of the many drunken dances she attends one wild night), Norval decides to step up and become the surrogate dad to the baby. Unfortunately, Trudy’s rather cranky policeman dad (a knockout performance from William Demarest, aka “Uncle Charlie” from the 1960’s TV series My Three Sons) misunderstands things and has a ton of charges placed on poor Norval, who spends a good deal of time trying to stay out of trouble (and nope, he’s got not too much luck in that department, either).

As you’re watching this screwball/slapstick hybrid and having your ears tickled by Sturges’ wonderfully layered dialog and the film’s breakneck pacing, you’ll probably wonder how the heck more than half of this film beat it past the overly strict censors of the era who actually rejected his original script by whittling it down to a mere ten pages or so. The answer is brains and talent. Sturges merely outsmarted the Code’s enforcers by using a good thesaurus along with double (and probably triple and quadruple) entendre plus a very talented cast of actors and actresses who literally and figuratively threw themselves into their work. Hutton’s party girl Trudy is the film’s breakout star because she plays it cute, but strong-willed and only slightly saucy in a sort of “What if Cyndi Lauper went back in time” sort of way. She’s not playing the steely-eyed swivel-hipped sexpot, a completely dumb blonde (outside the amnesia stuff, which works perfectly here) or the snarky femme fatale here – she’s just a girl who wants to have fun, damn the torpedoes, pass the punch bowl and “Daddy get the heck out of my way, I’m going to that dance!”

Her almost equal in comic timing here would be Diana Lynn as Trudy’s 14-year-old sister Emma. I’m betting real money that no one at Code Central or wherever the censors hung out with eagle eyes (sipping very weak tea) even figured that Sturges would give a 14-year old girl the wisdom of a middle-aged woman who’s seen and heard it all, but it’s there and hilarious. Some of her offhand remarks will have you tapping the rewind button, as will a few of the scenes with multiple characters onscreen yelling over each other and/or about to whip into a pratfall or other wild stunt. There’s a fantastic, memorable scene between Hutton, Lynn and Demarest where he’s about to go after Norval with blood in his eye and before you know it, *BOOM!!*, he’s on the ground with his daughters doing all they can to keep him from getting up. Demarest also takes a few very painful-looking (but hysterical) dives and falls during the film that make you hope they were one-take deals. Then again, you’ll probably be laughing so hard that you’ll be crying for any actual pain he felt.

(thank you, bvon44!)  

Eddie Bracken is great as Norval, but Hutton practically eats him alive when they’re on screen together, taking a it of advantage of him because Norval is a guy she can turn to in a jam and he gladly takes the fall because he wants to be closer to her. This actually works brilliantly as the ending rolls in, because you can just imagine what kind of future couple they’d make and that brings another layer of smiles to the mix. Even in the briefest scenes, Sturges keeps things rolling along and there’s not a lag here at all. Which is both a blessing and a curse, as sometimes you’ll be fighting to get a good breath in between bouts of laughing. Everything clicks right from the snappy opening scene that hooks you in and the movie is so packed with pratfalls, some eye and ear-popping dialog and other topical references smart viewers will hone in on quickly plus an ending that’s a total doozy (and uses that Shakespeare quote above extremely well indeed).

If anything, it’s MORE than clear that Sturges made this movie with the primary intent to show how dumb the Hays board and the Production Code was. The film throws so much at you so quickly that you’ll find that repeat viewings are a must. Granted, the ending loses it’s surprise value after the first time, but seeing some of the funnier sections or jokes you missed out on makes this one you’ll end up sharing with a few friends or lucky relatives. As noted above, double this up with Apatow’s more famous flick (or 1957’s less funny Jerry Lewis vehicle, Rock-a-Bye Baby) and see how you can get away with a barrel full of sex jokes without a dirty word being spoken. And if you fall head over heels for Hutton here, well… that’s double the pleasure, I say. Just don’t ask her to go out dancing afterwards…