95The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944)

With the country at war, the plot of this Preston Sturges screwball comedy made waves in Washington, D.C. Trudy (Betty Hutton), a nice girl from small-town Morgan’s Creek, wakes up from a drunken revelry with departing soldiers to discover she’s married one of them (she can’t remember who) and is also pregnant. Stepping into the breech is a young 4F named Norval (Eddie Bracken), who holds a candle for Trudy. Scandal and hijinks ensue. In City of Nets, his history of Hollywood, Otto Friedrich noted that Sturges resurrected Morgan’s Creek from a shelved script about “a small-town Virgin Mary who didn’t know how she’d become pregnant.” At a time when Hollywood was supposed to be churning out movies about the heroism of men in uniform, Sturges turned the patriotism formula on its ear by harvesting comedy from a different sort of take on what enlisted men leave behind.