Movie |
U.s. Soldier | Screwball Comedy
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Best Writing Original Screenplay | 1945
The long tracking shots of Betty Hutton and Eddie Bracken (and also Hutton and Diana Lynn) delivering pages of dialogue while walking for five minutes down several blocks of the town streets were extremely complex to film for that era. Cameras were placed on tracks and pulled backwards by six crewmembers. The sound crew also walked backwards with handheld boom microphones, while other assistants maneuvered 300 yards of cable, lights and reflectors. Preston Sturges and John Seitz shot more than 11,000 feet of film before they got the desired footage (400 feet) they needed.
Eddie Bracken later recalled that the studio was being driven crazy by the fact that Preston Sturges would spend the day rehearsing the camera and have nothing shot by 4:00 in the afternoon. However, the actor noted, between 4:00 and 6:00, Sturges would get 11 pages in the can, effectively producing in two hours what many directors shot in three days.
With changes to the first group of script pages still being negotiated, Preston Sturges did something he had never done before: he began shooting on the scheduled start date of production with barely ten pages of a finished script. In fact, so dependent was he on last minute improvisation and sudden bursts of creativity that it was almost at the end of production before he even knew what the miracle of the title would be. He shot for eight hours every day, then stayed up most of the night writing. This gave the whole process a sense of pressure atypical for a Sturges production.
The character Gov. McGinty is Dan McGinty, from the earlier film by Preston Sturges, The Great McGinty (1940). Brian Donlevy played the character in both films. Akim Tamiroff also appears as "The Boss," reprising his role from the earlier film.
When the film was released, it was such a huge hit, it was literally standing room only for many performances.
"Constable Kockenlocker: [to his 14-year-old daughter, gruffly but jokingly] Listen, Zipper-puss! Some day they're just gonna find your hair ribbon and an axe someplace. Nothing else! The Mystery of Morgan's Creek!"
"Mr. Johnson: The responsibility for recording a marriage has always been up to woman. If it wasn't for her, marriage would have disappeared long since. No man is going to jeopardize his present or poison his future with a lot of little brats hollering around the house unless he's forced to. It's up to the woman to knock him down, hogtie him, and drag him in front of two witnesses immediately if not sooner. Anytime after that is too late."
