Preston Sturges #6: "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" (1944)

It is this brief sojourn in Preston Sturges' career that saw the director slip into a one-two punch of small-town wartime hysteria - the first half being the wacky, unbounded and ultimately buoyant "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek". 
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In a career rife with production code red flags and taboo middle-class issues, Sturges never skirted the line of controversy like he does here. 
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Trudy Kockenlocker (played by Betty Hutton) is a small-town girl who wants to give the soldiers a fine night before their sent off to war in the morning. Against her father's wishes, she organizes a cover-up with the local dweeb, Norval, (Eddie Bracken, who would team up yet again with Sturges) so she can attend the dance and see the boys off. 
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In true hangover fashion, the events of the night are revealed piece-by-piece - partly because Trudy doesn't remember and partly because Sturges can't directly reveal the misdeeds of a young, drunken family girl. 
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To make a very long and very convoluted story short, Trudy finally realizes that not only did she remember marrying one of the soldiers, but she's pregnant. Together, she and Norval must find a way out of this predicament, which eventually will lead them up against the law. 
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It's well know that Sturges' films are like a student cramming for the exam that's twenty minutes away - dense, furious, nearly incomprehensible - but "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" is without a doubt his wildest ride.
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But wild for wild's sake would not a good movie make, for Sturges elevates the bare essentials of the material by injecting his self-referential and googly dialogue, abrasive small-town virtues gone amiss (a drunken marriage, out-of-wedlock pregnancy) and all at the expense of American soldiers on their way to the front - how's that for ya, censors?
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Now Sturges brilliantly frames the film around a certain telephone conversation (involving two townspeople speaking to two state officials, cameo appearances by Brian Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff, reprising their roles from "The Great McGinty") in which the point is made clear that something newsworthy or revelatory is going to happen. "You won't believe it," the men claim, and we wait patiently for the unbelievable.
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Well I'm not going to spoil the ending - the eponymous miracle - but it's perhaps the wackiest final card that Sturges has ever played at the end of his films, easily the most ironic punch-line of his career. [B+]