newcritics

R.I.P. Betty Hutton. It was a long, somewhat sad life. Other than a memorable appearance on a TCM special, she spent most of the past four decades out of the limelight. She wasn’t like her screen image. Married and divorced four times. Went bankrupt. Lived in a church rectory. Underwent psychiatric care. When she was buried this week in California, her three children didn’t come to her funeral, just her landlord.

Betty Hutton compared her career in Hollywood to being a piece of meat (”a hot dog,” to be specific.) While most of her obits led off with her replacing Judy Garland at the last minute in Annie Get Your Gun, her greatest artistic triumph will always be her starring role in Preston Sturges’ 1944 comic masterpiece, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. As the sweet but suddenly pregnant Trudy Kockenlocker (a name for the ages), she made poor Eddie Bracken see “Spots! Spots!” She was the last of the brilliant comic actors of Sturges’ movies, and now they are all gone, as is an era that would give free rein to an imagination as cockeyed and courageous as Sturges’.

I still don’t know how Sturges got away with The Miracle Of Morgan’s Creek: Sweet, small-town girl Trudy has a few too many drinks at a G.I. dance and wakes up pregnant. The unknown daddy, somebody named Ignatz Rat-Ratz-Ratzkywatsky, has shipped out. And Trudy is desperate and, of course, unmarried (how did Sturges slip this by the censors? Did he serve them the same drink as Trudy?)

Sturges wrote and directed a lot of great films (The Palm Beach Story, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, Unfaithfully Yours, Christmas In July), but none with quite this delicate balancing act, incorporating knockabout farce, sentimental pathos, wartime mischief, small-town romance and a bit of the Lifetime Channel, circa 1944. It’s so well acted by the stars. Hutton plays the determined ditz with her usual verve, but she never makes you think she is stuck up or superior, just a young girl making a young girl’s mistakes and paying severely for one night of forgotten fun.

But to me, it will always be Bracken’s movie. I sympathize (what guy doesn’t?) with the lovestruck, plain little fellow who adores the big, blond beauty and will do anything she asks, even pretending to take her on a movie date so she can slip away to a dance before the G.I.’s are dispatched overseas. The hurt look on Bracken’s face, the way his nervous Norval balances befuddlement, slow-burn anger and the ache of unrequited love, just breaks my heart. Remember the way he gazes at Trudy as she gives the lip-syncing demonstration in the record shop? How thrilled he is to go on a date with her and how devastated he is when he finds out he’s just playing the beard? Or the sweet walk they take around the town as he discovers the trouble she’s in and suddenly that old affliction — the one that’s unfairly kept him out of the service — rises up again before his eyes: “Spots! Spots!”

And, yet, what a kind, decent man Norval Jones is. He pledges to take care of Trudy despite what she’s done, and to me that’s the greatness of the movie: its underlying compassion. It comes through Norval’s character. And the scene with the Doctor that Trudy visits, who doesn’t berate her or treat her like a whore. It’s in the love you feel underneath the wisecracks of Trudy’s little sister (the wonderful Diana Lynn). And it especially comes through her old man, the cranky and seemingly clueless cop Col. Kockenlocker, when he finally discovers what has happened:

“The trouble with kids is they always figure they’re smarter than their parents. Never stop to think if their old man could get by for 50 years and feed ‘em and clothe ‘em, he maybe had something up here to get by with. Things that seem like brain twisters to you might be very simple for him.”

God, the genius of William Demarest. If anybody was ever overlooked for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, it was William Demarest in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. He should have won for the quality of his backwards pratfalls alone. Or the big fight scene on the lawn, which was the equal of anything by the Marx Bros. Or the crusty way he spit out the ever-timeless line that all fathers feel at one point or another: “Daughters! Phooey!” But you could see the heart underneath all that craggy contempt, the deep commitment to his girls, and never more so than in the wintry Capraesque scenes after Demarest loses his job and the family is forced to go to another town when Trudy’s pregnancy shows. The movie gets a little muddled here, as Sturges has to figure out how to get out of its predicament and you’ve got to hand it to him to turn disaster into a patriotic opportunity, courtesy of those old rogues from an earler Sturges flick, McGinty and the Boss.

God, what a movie.

The best way a film fan can honor Betty Hutton this week would be to watch The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek again. It will make you sad for her passing, but even sadder for knowing we’ll never have another Preston Sturges.