In the opening sequence of Preston Sturges war-time (1944) move, Hail the Conquering Hero, strange events threaten to derail the screwball comedy. A pair of shapely gams with tap-shoes attached dances across a floor and the camera dollies through a crowded night-club to pick out a mournful-looking man drinking by himself at the bar -- this isWoodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken) the hero of this film. A middle-aged woman sings a song about the devotion that should be accorded to all mothers and the waiters encircle her with their trays full of drinks and food. A group of Marines, on R & R in "Frisco," where the nightclub is located, enter the bar in lock-step as if marching on a parade-ground. Truesmith buys them drinks (they've lost all their money playing craps). The Marines are obviously a bit damaged by their combat experiences at Guadalcanal (a place no one really knows how to properly pronounce). One of the Marines, who is palpably deranged (he's called Bugsy) takes offense at Truesmith's disregard for his own mother. Truesmith, whose lifelong ambition was to be a Marine, has been booted out of the service due to hay-fever and he's working in a shipyard but has written letters to his mother, claiming to be in combat in the South Pacific. (He's also written a letter to his fiance, lying as well, and telling her that he's fallen in love with some other woman, also an untruth intended to conceal his shame at being found unworthy for combat service.) Bugsy is appalled that Truesmith would mislead his mother -- the poor bastard is shell-shocked and was raised in an orphanage -- and finds a phone, calls Truesmith's mother and says that the "combat-decorated Marine" will be returning to his home-town, a little burg called Oakridge on the morrow. This puts the plot in motion -- a combination of drunkenness, shell-shock, and hysterical mother-worship.
Sturges made nine movies between 1940 and 1949, about half of them acclaimed as masterpieces (Sullivan's Travels, The Lady Eve, Palm Beach Story, Miracle at Morgan's Creek and, Hail the Conquering Hero.) The films feature rapid-fire ultra-literate dialogue, slapstick, and cynical satire. Sturges was not a visual stylist -- like most directors of comedy, he's mainly concerned that audiences hear the gags and brittle insults from which he composes the script. (Sturges both wrote and directed these films.) Hail the Conquering Hero seems to be a giddy patriotic war-time farce but it has odd undertones of melancholy and grief and, as observed, it's frenetic plot is rocketed into action by the phone-call of a madman, Bugsy.
Truesmith, now decked out in a Marine uniform with a medal on his chest, gets hauled forcibly onto the railroad platform at his home-town. Everyone has turned out to greet him and there are no less than four marching bands in attendance with enormous banners welcoming him home. (Sturges is making a point about war-hysteria.) The tough-as-nails Marines proclaim Truesmith to be a hero, asserting that he slaughtered dozens of "Nips" at Guadalcanal. The townsfolk go mad with adulation and, ultimately, press-gang him into running for mayor against a plutocrat who dominates the village's politics -- the man is the president and owner of the Nobles Chair Company, the town's largest employer and a vain, preening politician who is not well-liked (it seems that even his wife detests him.) Complicating the picture is the fact that Truesmith's girlfriend still loves him despite being engaged to Noble's bland, if well-bred and polite son, a handsome stiff in thrall to his overbearing and loutish father. The town is depicted in bucolic terms, but it's populated entirely by rabid, bloodthirsty hometown patriots, hypocritical clergy and officials, and is more like the sinister village in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt than the idyllic place that it is supposed to represent. At its pictorial center, there's a shrine to Truesmith's deceased father, also a Marine who was killed in Belleau Wood on the very day that his posthumous son was born. The shrine to the dead hero has as its counterpart a bronze equestrian statue to General Zabrisky, incongruously near the train station and a monument admired by everyone, although no one seems to know who Zabrisky was, or why there's a monument to him -- it seems that the City Father's got a bargain on the used monument and bought it as a whim. The Marines who form an honor-guard around Truesmith, who has advanced unwittingly so deeply into fraud he can't find his way back to honesty, are shown twice threatening mayhem -- they carry behind their backs all sorts of weapons with which to attack the townsfolk if something goes wrong -- and there's a question as to who threatens the village more, the distant "nips", our "brown brothers" they are called, or the cadre of violent Marines. Everything ultimately gets resolved in what seems to be a happy ending, but the movie leaves an acrid, sour aftertaste in the mouth. This is a very bitter, challenging picture pretending to be a frothy comedy with distinct traces of mourning and madness underlying its giddy imagery. The weird substrate of mother idolatry suggests an oedipal fixation, a sort of Freudian undertone to all the wild-eyed patriotism. And the film is visually claustrophobic -- just about every shot is filled to the brim with mobs of people all jostling one another and shoving and pushing. There are no close-ups just a couple of two-shots but the film's visual emphasis is to show the protagonist thronged by extras, caught in the crush of rabid crowds suffused with patriotic bloodlust. It's loud, rambunctious, and disturbing. Lurking beneath the marching, jostling crowds is the sense that, at any moment, the multitude will become a lynch-mob -- the giddy hysteria in the processions and assemblies seems about to turn into wild violence at any moment. War has driven everyone insane. These folks are as besotted with war as Germans at the Nuremberg rallies. (There's a curious democratic impulse in Sturges' films -- the minor characters have just as much energy as the main players; Hail the Conquering Hero features William Demarest as the leader of the Marines, as well as Franklin Pangborn as an unctuous town official. Bugsy is played by an ex-boxer, Freddie Steele, who may have been a little punch-drunk; he can't act but Sturges puts this to good effect -- the guy is supposed to half-mad, state-raised and shell-shocked to boot, so it's not surprising that he delivers his lines without any affect at all.)
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