Word: huttons
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...Sturges got her to channel her hyperactivity in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, a 1944 comedy that transposes the Nativity story to an American town overrun with horny soldiers. Hutton's Trudy Kockenlocker is a virginal party girl who gets drunk and pregnant on a toot with the boys in uniform. To save the family's reputation, Trudy must convince Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken), the 4F loony who has loved her since childhood, to marry her while impersonating the soldier who knocked her up - whoever he was. (Trudy thinks his name might have been Ignatz Ratzkiwatzki.) Addressing all kinds...
...haven't seen the movie, stop reading now and get a hold of it. It's unique in many ways, not least as a Hutton vehicle. Sturges, a raffish character who was every bit as rumbustious as his star, nonetheless cast her as the recipient of most of the mayhem rather than the perp; and he didn't give her any numbers to sing. The set pieces here are all conversations - between Trudy and Norval or Trudy and her savvy kid sister (Diana Lynn) - eight extended dialogues, from two to four mins. long, and most of them done without cutting...
...pity that Sturges and Hutton made only this film together. But her mentor, DeSylva, was Sturges' tormentor (on TCM Hutton says that "Buddy didn't like him because he didn't hit schedules") and soon hounded Paramount's prize writer-director off the lot. Partly as a result of the Sturges exile, Hutton's movies thereafter were mostly dreck, occasionally animated by her nutty novelties songs. The films are fairly summarized in these TIME reviews, most of them by Agee, wearing himself out to find new descriptions for Betty-mania...
...Star Spangled Rhythm: "Betty Hutton, during a wild, bruising ride in a jeep, sings a ditty known as I'm Doin' It for Defense." Let's Face It: "Throaty Betty Hutton provides a diversion with a machine-gun-speed offering of Let's Not Talk About Love." And the Angels Sing: [Hutton] gets funnier with every picture. She is the most startling expression of natural force since the Johnstown Flood." In The Stork Club, "Her songs are undistinguished but her uninhibited way of putting them over is an eclectic mixture of Harlem and Bali, with a shout from the heyday...
...sleep because the guy upstairs plays boogie-woogie all night: "He goes a-rumble, rumble, rumble on the bottom,/ He goes a-tinkle, tinkle, tinkle on the top./ Rumble, rumble, rumble, / Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, / Positively won't stop!" (Get this on the CD Spotlight on Betty Hutton: Great Ladies of Song...