Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
Panic!: The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
- Saturday, May 17, 2025 / 2:00 PM - 4:30 PM (PDT)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 4K digital projection (99 minutes)
- With Charles Wolfe (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) and Patrice Petro (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center)
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Director: Preston Sturges
Starring: Eddie Bracken and Betty Hutton
Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944) is a fast-paced screwball comedy that satirizes wartime America with madcap energy. The film follows Trudy Kockenlocker (Betty Hutton), a wayward young woman who attends a raucous all-night farewell party for departing soldiers in her small town. The next day, Trudy awakens to find herself married and pregnant, with no memory of her new suitor’s identity. As she scrambles to untangle the mess, the well-meaning but hapless Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken) offers to help, leading to a series of increasingly absurd complications. In its portrayal of scandalous small-town panic, the film both provoked the Hays Code and rankled the United States War Department. Sturges transforms anxieties surrounding marriage and patriotic duty into a whirlwind of comedic chaos, exposing the absurdity of rigid societal expectations. A daring and subversive take on small-town mores, the film remains one of Sturges’ most sharply satirical comedies.
Charles Wolfe (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) will join Patrice Petro (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center) for a post-screening discussion of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.
This event is free but a reservation is recommended in order to guarantee a seat.
Biographies
Charles Wolfe (Film and Media Studies, UCSB)
Charles Wolfe is the author of two books on the films of director Frank Capra and has published widely on the history of commercial, independent, and documentary filmmaking in the US. He is co-editor of the AFI’s Film Reader Series, which has published 41 volumes of new critical essays on topics in film, television, and digital media studies.
He chaired the Department of Film and Media Studies from 1994 to 1998, and he served as Associate Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at UCSB from 2003 to 2008. A member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies from 2006 to 2009, Wolfe has also served on the advisory or editorial boards of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Cinema Journal, and Studies in Documentary Film.
Patrice Petro (Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center)
Patrice Petro is Professor of Film and Media Studies, Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, and Presidential Chair in Media Studies. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of fourteen books, including Uncanny Histories in Film and Media Studies (2022), The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (with Kristin Hole, Dijana Jelaca, and E. Ann Kaplan, 2017), Teaching Film (2012), Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s (2010), Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror” (2006), and Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (2002). She served two terms as President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the largest US professional organization for college and university educators, filmmakers, historians, critics, scholars, and others devoted to the study of the moving image.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center and the James Hayman (’75) fund for CWC Classics.
CWC Presents: Panic!
The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2024-25 feature series Panic! explores the complex relationship between media, an anxious public, and the turbulent currents of social, cultural, and moral panic. The series will examine how such panics have appeared on screen over the decades, but also consider how the screen itself—as technology, as gathering space, and as a site of fantasy and desire—becomes the object of reactionary backlash. Panic! will be a yearlong showcase of the films, discourses, and cultural practices that have tested the limits of public acceptability, and that have much to teach us about the cycles of panic that define our own political moment.
CWC Classics
The CWC Classics program celebrates cinema’s rich history, bringing classic films back to the big screen for critical viewing and discussion. These events feature filmmakers, academics, and professionals who can contextualize the production and historical impact of the films. The series occasionally presents classic films in their original 16 or 35 mm formats. CWC Classics events celebrate the history and significance of cinema’s enduring legacy.