Concerning Miracles
By ELLIOT PAUL
OF HOLLYWOOD miracles, ranging from the earliest De Mille to the latest Zanuck, it is painful to speak. One need only say, “Too easy,” and let it go at that. The real, authentic miracle Hollywood can accomplish is to get out a brilliant motion picture every two or three years.
The hazards between the cup and the lip, to put it figuratively, are both numerous and grave. If a story is good before some studio buys it, usually a group of so-called screen writers are goaded until the piece contains so much bilge that it takes another batch of writers anywhere from six months to three years to get it out again. In doing so, they also extract, the original story, and then all hands have to hold conferences and think up an entirely new one. This, in trade parlance, is called “licking” a story, and no slang Americans ever have devised is more apt. The story is not only licked, but is punch-drunk, and unfit for further appearance in the ring.
About the time a script is “finished,” a director is called in and decides to take it apart and do it some other way. And when he is exhausted, a couple of stars decide that one or the other is stealing the picture, or that the theft is being planned by some good character actor unentitled by his salary to “get the girl” (probably on the theory that he could not support a star in the style to which she has grown accustomed).
Any life or sparkle that is left, after writers, producers, directors, and stars get through with it, is extinguished by the Hays Office, which concerns itself not only with public morals, but patriotism, medicine, political theories, economic principles, religious qualms (if highly organized), and even diet.
It was long after we had been fighting and bleeding in this war to end wars that the Hays group was persuaded to declare an open season on Nazis. Before that, anyone who killed one, even to escape from death by torture in a concentrat ion camp, was guilty of Hays-murder and had to serve at least six Hays-years. I have often wondered, in thinking about the fantastic Hays code of crime and punishment, if motion picture addicts wake up in the night and remember how many actors and actresses are sleeping in graveyards, like Sweet. Alice, or languishing in jails and dungeons, because of cinematographic felonies or misdemeanors. I should like to visualize Joan Doakes, of Duluth, staring into the moonlight through her chamber window and counting the days before some favorite heavy’s term will be up and he will be free again. What Hays seems to have forgotten is that the actors who do wrong and are punished are all too likely to be at large doing their dirty work in the selfsame theater the same evening on a twin bill.
A Massachusetts jurist, Judge Washburn, whom I never tire of quoting, laid down the principle that it is impossible always to be wrong. The Hays crew have again confirmed this in permitting Preston Sturges’s Miracle of Morgan’s Creek to reach the delighted public without having been sterilized and dry-cleaned. The result is a miracle, in more ways than one; a miracle of intelligent humorous writing, casting, directing, photography, and not only artistic, but financial, success. No one who loves the “art” or “industry” — whichever you like better—can fail to be encouraged and grateful when a genius at Hollywood gets the better of the horde of fumblers and actually sets a milestone on the long, hard road to better films. To the list of first-class achievements, among which the discriminating will remember The Informer (Dudley Nichols); The Long Voyage Home (Dudley Nichols); Citizen Kane (Orson Welles); Holy Matrimony (Nunnally Johnson); and The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith), one may now add The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. Preston Sturges wrote it, directed it, and cast it.
Probably the Hays Office let the picture pass because no one understood exactly what happened. As a matter of fact, I do not understand too well myself, but it is the things I do not understand that I like best. In the words of the hymnist, “I do not ask to see I he distant scene, — one step enough for me.”
As best I remember it, Trudy went out with some servicemen and, after bumping her head, got married to a soldier who was drunk. Just the mere suggestion that a soldier would drink is usually enough to put the Hays Office in a dither.
Anyway, Trudy, not knowing if or whom she had married, finds herself pregnant, and to save her “ honor,” the accommodating Norval is willing to marry her by proxy. This act of charity turns out first to be a crime and then, after the birth of sextuplets, is mysteriously and conveniently legalized by a corrupt state government.
In the final scene, when Nerval’s nerves give way and he sees the dreaded spots, we are never sure whether he intends to embrace Trudy or strangle her. After such a hilarious evening it. doesn’t matter.
Betty Hutton gave to the heroine, Trudy Kockenlocker, her abundant life and vitality, an almost unearthly tenderness and generosity, a blossoming, delectable, and straightforward womanhood that is not Chinese, or French, or Central European, or Scandinavian, or Russian. Betty — what she does and says, how she acts and what she looks like — is the difference between the best American acting and the foreign brands. It points straight into the future of Democracy, of freedom, of equality, and of robust art. Watching Betty in action is like stepping forward into another and kinder century, where women of the future will be lustier, stronger, overflowing with careless love.
There must have been some hot Betty Huttons in the days of Rabelais and Fielding and Chaucer. When the Vikings of yore sat around the board, with roast meat on the table and a hole in the roof for a chimney, and caroused with their women between them, and the women lifted their bowls of mead and drank whenever their men did, and sang just as loudly, and often dragged the heroes out and put them to bed, there were the ancestors of Betty Hutton. If she does not set a new and wonderful style in screen actresses, — girls who can sit on a quarter without leaving “In God We Trust” exposed, who will not break hearts listlessly but solace any number of them magnificently, — then I am much mistaken.
Stars who are jealous of other stars are lamentably mistaken. The fact that Eddie Bracken gave a superb performance, in every way the equal of Betty’s, did not detract from her. They built each other up. In For Whom there was only one Paxinou, in The More the Merrier one Coburn. In Sturges’s Miracle were two performers in the leading roles and two others in secondary roles who constituted what one is tempted to say is the first Hollywood cast that could compare with the old Moscow Art players. Each one was truly great. The two I refer to, besides Hutton and Bracken, are William Demarest as Officer Kockenlocker and Diana Lynn as the younger sister.
Bracken as Norval portrayed the wistful young man who is neither brilliant nor handsome and who, because of sensitive nerves, cannot get into a uniform when girls are stirred by nothing else.
MRS. JOHNSON: Couldn’t the doctor give you something to keep you calm just long enough for the examination . . . like some whiskey or something?
NORVAL: I’m perfectly calm . . . I’m as cool as ice, then I start to think maybe they won’t take me, then some cold sweat runs down the middle of my back, then my head starts to buzz, then everything begins to swim in the middle of the room and I get black spots in front of my eyes, then they say I’ve got high blood pressure again and all the time I’m as cool as ice.
A phone rings and he jumps four feet straight up in the air.
Years ago there was a small group of writers, of whom I had the luck to be one, who tried using the American language and not copybook English for purposes we hoped would be literature. If anyone thinks that Sturges’s lines have not a compelling rhythm as native to us as ham and eggs, that his short speeches do not crackle and his long ones mount through periods to a climax, let him go back to Aristophanes and Shakespeare and Shaw, and read Preston Sturges again. If he is of the school that sighs and says, “My boy, there were actors then,” let him hear Eddie Bracken read those lines I have just quoted. And when he jumps he will laugh involuntarily and feel at the same time the empty ache of old frustrations. Sturges keeps up such a pace from beginning to end that, one is not aware of all the nuances and the wealth of pathos and amusement one is experiencing. One leaves the theater happily exhausted, and for a long time afterward recalls separate instances and feels them all over again.
One of the riddles of the universe is that adult parents, while alive, act like amiable nitwits. They are has-beens and don’t know it. They try to be dignified and sage, and always are comical. The younger generation is always right, while it is young. It is perpetually shufiling off a lot of hooey and reaching toward more solid ground. Only years and years later is it apparent that, both ways of life had their points, and that human progress is a flight of stairs, of which each generation forms one step.
Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken) is the kind of boy who is born to make some woman a good husband. He does not think highly of himself, he is humble, willing, adoring, unquestioning. He has been the goat several times when Trudy (Betty Hutton) and Emmy (Diana Lynn) are discussing the possibility of inveigling him into the ultimate sacrifice.
TRUDY: He was so sweet, honey . . . he said he loved me ever since I wasn’t any bigger than a fire hydrant or something, then how he didn’t blame me for not loving him because he was so homely in the face and stuff like that . . . and then (she starts to gulp) . . . then how he went to cooking class and s-s-sewing class just to be near me . . . (she starts to yammer).
EMMY: But he’s perfect. . . . He could do all the housework.
TRUDY (bawling):I couldn’t do it to him.
EMMY: Why don’t you give yourself up? . . . You ought to have your brains counted.
TRUDY: I just couldn’t do it. . . . We’ll have to find something else.
EMMY: Where are you going to find another clunk like that one?
That last line, delivered without the exact touch, might seem shallow or contemptuous. Instead it was poignant. It was the man-woman relationship distilled. I frankly wept. Where, indeed, would a girl in distress find a man with lots of heart and oceans of love and not too many brains? Such men are the salt of the earth and salvation of women, as noble, generous women are made for attractive, unscrupulous men who can crush from them the ultimate sainthood. That is life, the kind of life felt and understood and portrayed by a Nunnally Johnson or Preston Sturges, the essence of comedy that tugs at the heart and stimulates courage and a zesl for it all.
In another beautiful passage between the sisters Emmy says, “What’s the matter with you, he was made for it . . . like the ox was made to eat . . . and the grape was made to drink.”
One of the remarkable Sturges devices for comedy effects is his use of proper names. The tough cop and harassed father, for instance, is called Kockenlocker, while the obviously Jewish music-store proprietor is named Rafferty. Ben Hecht in his splendid book on anti-Semitism pleaded for the return to stage and screen of the Jewish comedian. Rafferty, so well acted by Harry Rosenthal, is in answer to Hecht’s prayer.
Will the sane and sober readers of the Atlantic believe me if I state for the record that the brains of Paramount, while yelling and screaming praises of a sickening hodgepodge like For Whom the Bell Tolls, shelved The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek for more than a year, believing it to be unworthy of the Paramount trademark? It was only by accident that it was released at all.
I confess that I love pictures. I am thrilled by their possibilities, driven almost to suicide at times by their asininity, and when I see, right up thereon the screen, a sequence that justifies the rich and wonderful medium, I want to shout, and throw telephone books in the air, and squirt siphons, and slap forbidden areas, help the armed forces, and, in general, erupt. I know that hundreds of others feel the same way, and that somewhere, sometime, between wars and secure from greed and muttonheaded nonsense, there will be motion pictures, and radio shows, and television, and better, more farreaching mediums of expression and communication and instruction and refreshment.