The Critics' Corner on THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK

When it was finally released after nearly a year, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek became Preston Sturges' most successful film and the biggest hit of 1944, often playing to standing-room-only houses and grossing more than $10 million in just two years.

"The watchmen for the usually prim Hays office certainly permitted themselves a Jovian nod when confronted with the irrepressible impudence of Preston Sturges' The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. For a more audacious picture - a more delightfully irreverent one - than this new lot of nonsense...has never come slithering madly down the path. Mr. Sturges, who is noted for his railleries of the sentimental, the pompous and the smug...has hauled off this time and tossed a satire which is more cheeky than all the rest." - Bosley Crowther, New York Times, January 1944

"The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, the new Preston Sturges film, seems to me funnier, more adventurous, more abundant, more intelligent, and more encouraging than anything that has been made in Hollywood for years...The essential story is hardly what you would expect to see on an American scene...The girl's name, Trudy Kockenlocker, of itself relegates her to a comic-strip world in which nothing need be regarded as real; the characters themselves are extremely stylized...Thanks to these devices the Hays office has either been hypnotized into a liberality for which it should be thanked, or has been raped in its sleep." - James Agee, The Nation, January 1944

"A little like talking to a nun on a roller coaster." - James Agee, Time, 1944

"The special exhilaration of this comedy - more than exhilaration, the contagious happiness of this ending, that peak of excitement and gratification to which it's all been building - is without parallel in Sturges' work, or elsewhere, so far as I know." - James Harvey, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, from Lubitsch to Sturges (Knopf, 1987)

"The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is so filled with violence, disorder, and misunderstanding that I have known people to emerge from it trembling." - David Thomson, quoted in Romantic Comedy in Hollywood by James Harvey

"The film's pace and comic timing make it one of Preston Sturges's best satires on small-town America." - The Oxford Companion to Film.

"To use the jargon of the '40s, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek got away with murder. By presenting itself as an exaggerated satire of American mores, it managed to make jokes about not only unwed pregnancy but also the Nativity. It makes a shambles of the world "our boys" were supposed to be fighting to preserve. It is a purely American film - self-critical, loaded with energy, packed with dialogue and event, perfectly timed, and literally reeling with comedy." - Jeanine Basinger, The International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers

"Great verbal gags and non-sequiters, fast-paced action, and a thorough irreverence for all things deemed respectable - politicians, policemen and magistrates - make it a lasting delight." - Geoff Andrew, TimeOut Film Guide

"This is one of Preston Sturges's surreal-slapstick-satire-conniption-fit comedies, and part of our great crude heritage." - Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies

"Frenetic comedy with rapid-fire dialogue doesn't reach sophistication of other Sturges films - in fact, it's a bit smutty - but there are moments of genuine hilarity...What I really like about the film is how Sturges repeatedly crowds throngs of people into the small frame - the perfect visual for conveying how, when something happens in a smalltown, everybody comes snooping around. Also watch the interesting smalltown background action when Bracken and Hutton take walks." - Danny Peary, Guide For the Film Fanatic.

"Weird and wonderful one-man assault on the Hays Office and sundry other American institutions such as motherhood and politics; an indescribable, tasteless, roaringly funny melee, as unexpected at the time as it was effective, like a kick in the pants to all other film comedies." - Halliwell's Film & Video Guide.

"The film moves in a fantastic and irreverent whirl of slapstick, nonsense, farce, sentiment, satire, romance, melodrama - is there any ingredient of dramatic entertainment except maybe tragedy and grand opera that hasn't been tossed into it?" - National Board of Review.

"Done in the satirical Sturges vein, and directed with that same touch, the story makes much of characterization and somewhat wacky comedy, plus some slapstick, with excellent photography figuring throughout...However, some of the comedy situations lack punch, and the picture is slow to get rolling.." - Variety Movie Guide.

Awards & Honors:

Sturges received an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay. He was also nominated that same year for the screenplay of Hail the Conquering Hero (1944).

In 2001, the film was chosen by the National Film Preservation Board to be one of the motion pictures preserved on the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.

Compiled by Rob Nixon