Preston Sturges' 1944 Hail the Conquering Hero! is an audacious high wire act balanced between breathtaking cynicism and full-throated, if sophisticated, patriotism. Sturges' is performing without a net -- when a crowd gathers in the film, the hero assumes it's for a lynching and the stakes are high: the movie has a number of insert shots of bludgeons, fists wrapped in belt-leather, and a short fracas toward the film's end leaves both participants spouting blood from their smashed mouths. If our cynicism is too strong, a patriotic mob might tar and feather us; conversely, if the patriotic elements of the film prevail too unequivocally, we're left with military fascism American-style. The fact that a supposedly frothy comedy raises these options suggest the tension underlying the film, a fraught kind of balance verging on the hysterical that I can admire (as I do the film) but not really enjoy.
The film's hero (literally and figuratively), Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith, played by Eddie Bracken, was born at the precise moment that his father, "Hinkydink" Truesmith perished in the World War One battle of Boileu Wood. His mother keeps a shrine to the fallen Marine in her living room, an image to which the film reverts in its last shot. Woodrow has always dreamed of being a Marine but when he reported for duty in World War Two, he was dismissed from Boot Camp after only a month of basic training -- poor Woodrow suffers from hay fever and, therefore, was deemed unsuitable for military service. Woodrow conceals his dismissal from the Marine Corps by sending letters to his fiancée and mother claiming that he has been shipped to the south Pacific to fight the Japs. (In the letter to his fiancée, Wilson forlornly ends their relationship -- he feels "unmanly" for not engaging in combat in the war.) As the film begins, an elaborate tracking shot (probably an influence on similar sequences in Scorsese's Goodfellas) sweeps through a big dance-hall locating the morose Woodrow Truesmith drinking alone at the bar and bemoaning his fate to the barkeep -- he's been working in a San Francisco shipyard. A cohort of six Marines led by William Demarest burst into the bar, but without any money -- they try to cadge drinks with a tooth ripped from a dead Jap. Truesmith stands them to drinks and they learn his sad story. One of the Marines is a kind of fetishist -- any insult to a mother earns his furious anger. Appalled that Truesmith has lied to his mother, the Marine calls her and announces that Woodrow is returning to town, further representing that he is a decorated warrior. All six Marines pressgang Woodrow into returning to his hometown where he is met by a chaotic reception -- at least four marching bands vie to salute the "conquering hero" and hundreds of people wave patriotic signs in his honor. In rapid succession, the City Fathers cancel his mother's mortgage, announce that he and his father Hinkydink will appear on a monument in the town square, and, ultimately, offer him a candidacy for Mayor. There are other complications -- his fiancée still loves him even though she's now engaged to the somewhat saturnine if very handsome and wealthy son of the town's acting mayor, the villainous Everett Noble. Woodrow is appalled and feels terribly guilty about the imposture. At the climax, he delivers a big speech at a political gathering admitting that he is a fraud. The speech is so eloquent and the support of the real Marines so touchingly earnest and loyal that the townspeople forgive him and he gets the girl. The six Marines depart for the war standing in a solid phalanx at the back of a locomotive -- they salute Woodrow and he salutes them back and, then, the film ends with an unsettling bit of hagiography, the shrine to Hinkydink over the hearth in the widow's house.
Summarized thus, the film seems a bit conventional. But, in fact, it is anything but. The first half of the film features takes lasting two or three minutes in which the screen is filled to overflowing with crowds of people. Every square inch of the image is occupied with writhing humanity and the effect is claustrophobic -- one feels trapped by the wall to wall mass of people and this effect correlates nicely with Woodrow's feeling that he is similarly entrapped. Everyone talks all the time -- there is an endless stream of witty patter, shouted threats and imprecations, bands playing in the manner of Charles Ives (four bands playing four separate songs at one time), dogs bark and children scream and cry and everything is crowded, excessive, thronged. A couple of examples must suffice: the six Marines always move in a mass -- they seem to be based, perhaps, on the dwarfs in Disney's Sleeping Beauty; all of them are characterized and have speaking parts and it's simply too much to grasp, a constant torrent of chatter, abuse, threats, boasting, every imaginable type of speech act performed in every scene. When the nasty Mayor dictates a letter to his son, he continuously humiliates the young man with a stream of emasculating invective -- the quarrel involves whether you can say "both" when you are referring to three things. During this scene, there a cynical consiglieri who mutters unsavory advice to the Mayor, Truesmith's girlfriend who takes over the dictation, and, in the background, a constant chorus of praise to Truesmith as a parade seems to be perpetually passing outside the window with bands playing and choirs singing. The sinister aspect of these crowd scenes which are ubiquitous is that the crowd seems to teeter on the edge of becoming a lynch mob and everyone is constantly preparing for extreme violence. The dialogue is so swift and epigrammatic that it passes before it can be properly enjoyed -- you're always playing catch-up. The Mayor's slogan is "Horny Hands and Honest Hearts." Someone says "If all good men wore medals than we could always tell the good from the bad." A grandmotherly woman consoles a girl by saying: "There's war for you. Always hard on women. Either they take your man away from you and never send him back at all or they send him back to you unexpectedly so that everyone's embarrassed." All walls are plastered with BUY WAR BONDS slogans and the film ends on a patriotic note, but one that is tempered: One starry-eyed character says, apropos the election: "What do we want a soldier for?" But then he answers his own question: " It's just like when a girl wants a man." Someone else notes: "you see why they don't send McArthur back during an election year." Somehow all the war-hysteria is both appalling and ennobling. Eddie Bracken is great as Woodrow -- Bracken is one of those leading men, a bit like Spencer Tracy, who is not conventionally handsome. In fact, Bracken may be one of Hollywood's most improbable heroes -- he has broad Slavic features, a kind of Mr. Potato-Head aspect, with a nose that someone manages to seem both flattened and hooked at the same time. Sturges is clearly an influence on a number of more recent directors -- the torrent of words and the dense compositions full of swarming people reminds me both of the TV show Veep and films by Aaron Sorkin. In fact, Hail the Conquering Hero contains an elaborate "walk and talk" sequence involving Woodrow and his girlfriend -- the scene is clearly a model for similar scenes in The West Wing and other Sorkin productions.
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