By Noel Vera
DVD Review
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
Directed by Preston Sturges
Ordet
Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
(Warning: plot of both The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Ordet to be discussed in close detail.)
Maybe the funniest joke in Preston Sturges’ classic comedy The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek — about Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton wearing arguably the most hilariously salacious moniker in all of cinema) who in a night of drunken partying with a band of soldiers finds herself in the family way — was that it got made in the first place, in 1944, under the supposedly watchful eyes of the Hays Office (and in fact they were watching: when the picture was being developed the Office approved of only 10 of the script’s pages). Film critic James Agee topped this topper with his quip: “the Hays Office has either been hypnotized into a liberality for which it should be thanked, or has been raped in its sleep.” I love the film, but do feel that Sturges was further upstaged by the Office itself when it cautioned that the filmmakers should depict the unseen military officers as “normal, thoroughly fit American soldiers who have had an evening of clean fun.”
Agee had few other kind words, chiding the film for its “avoidance of commitment” and “artful-dodging,” and you do sense a European-style decadence in Sturges’ refusal to take a moral stance for or against Trudy’s delicate condition, not even against the society that backed her into a corner where she has to consider her condition “delicate.” Most recent articles I’ve read talk about how the film “slipped one past the censors”; none I can think of actually discusses what it slipped past other than the hilariously lurid premise, if it slipped anything at all. Sturges himself maintained in his biography that he wanted to show what happened to girls who “confused patriotism with promiscuity”; the crucial scene where a pastor explains this was cut by the studio, however, because it was too funny.
It’s still an intricately well-made gem, with interlacing dialogue and slapstick funnier than any half-dozen comedies today. Single mothers being a source of shame or derision is an almost medieval concept, even in recent small-town America; watching the film you have to stop and remember what the fuss was about in the first place (now if Trudy had wanted an abortion that would be a whole other can of worms).
I think Agee could be forgiven for thinking the film does sidestep the issues — when things are pushed as far as they can go before the ultimate collapse into bathos, or perhaps a few moments after we have wallowed in that bathos, the “miracle” happens and all is swept aside in the enormity of the event’s unlikeliness (not so unlikely today, in the age of fertility drugs and Octomom). Was Sturges only responding to Agee’s complaint when he confessed his true intent? Come to think of it, was Agee the only critic on record who actually had a complaint? Was Sturges’ real purpose — or moral point if you like — to refrain from judging Trudy, to say that her “predicament” is ultimately inconsequential in the face of life and its myriad surprises? Who knows?
THE DANISH GIRL
Watching the early scenes in the Borgen household in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet one can’t help the nagging thought: where have I seen this before? Took me all of 20 minutes to realize I was watching a Danish version of Morgan’s Creek complete with serenely pregnant woman, fuming irate father, ardent young suitor, even a cow — not standing in the kitchen, alas, but sounding so vividly close you can imagine it having wandered in from the back door.
Ordet does play like a domestic comedy. Albeit at a decidedly different pace and tone from Sturges, but with the same benign sense of an oddball if ultimately comforting world where obstacles are just minor contrivances meant to make the ultimate union between young lovers that much sweeter, and characters are presented not as actually crazy but perhaps mildly kinked, bent hairpins helpless to change the way they are.
Then the birth, the more horrific for being all suggestion — the desperate intake of breath (Brigitte Federspiel was pregnant during shooting and Dreyer reportedly recorded her moaning gasping labor), the terrible sound of shears snipping flesh — and everything is changed. Death has stepped into this Sturges-like fairy-tale, and the lovable irate father is all twisted in his grief; he would seem grotesque if he wasn’t so unbearably sad.
If Dreyer has a moral, it isn’t as obvious as Sturges’ stated “nice girls shouldn’t put out.” Yes Dreyer’s miracle is thoroughly foreshadowed; yes the miracle worker Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye) in claiming to be Jesus declares he’s helpless in the face of (their, our) skepticism. Dreyer stops short of declaring “The power of Christ compels you!” — as Jonathan Rosenbaum points out in his comprehensive analysis “Mis-en-scene as Miracle in Dreyer’s Ordet,” Johannes was already sane by the time he wrought his miracle, and theoretically (since he no longer believes he’s Jesus) should have no such power: the miracle happens whether we believe in him or not.
A comedy where tragedy is averted by a miraculous birth, another where death is averted by a miraculous resurrection; an ostensibly amoral satirist, a supposedly religious aesthete. Is there an obvious lesson to be drawn from any of this? None, apparently: merely two filmmakers at the peak of their powers, apprehending life from as many angles as they can manage with their restless, relentless cameras.
