NFR Project: 'Hail the Conquering Hero' (1944)

 

NFR Project: “Hail the Conquering Hero”

Dir: Preston Sturges

Scr: Preston Sturges

Pho: John F. Seitz

Ed: Stuart Gilmore

Premiere: Aug. 9, 1944

101 min.

It’s the great comic writer/director Preston Sturges’ most pointed satire, the most heartfelt and the most subversive.

To tackle the theme of false heroism during wartime is seemingly a losing proposition. The last thing any studio executive at the time would want would be a film questioning martial prowess. Nonetheless, Sturges saw the comic possibilities in the idea and pushed it to its logical conclusion.

Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken) was born nine months after his father died a hero in World War I. Yearning to become a Marine himself, he enlists when World War II breaks out, but is rejected for extreme hay fever. He goes to work is a shipyard, but doesn’t tell his mother he got washed out of the service. Instead he writes letters indicating that he has gone overseas.

Now he longs to go home to his small town, but he can’t think of how to do it. Six Marines enter the bar he’s in – he buys them all beer and sandwiches, and they find out his story. The six of them figure out a way – being helpful, they dress Woodrow as one of them, pin medals they’ve won on his chest, and escort him home.

Woodrow thinks he can get away with his subterfuge quietly – but then the entire town comes out to meet him at the train station, with multiple brass bands and banners. He is lionized by everyone in town. They burn his mother’s mortgage. They nominate him for mayor. His girlfriend, who he broke up with by mail, wants him back.

Woodrow frantically tries to make things right and only gets in deeper and deeper. The desperation and panic is palpable through Bracken’s flawless portrayal of Woodrow. He is the typical Sturges hero – confused, panicked, completely reluctant. All the usual Sturges players are here, including Franklin Pangorn, Jimmy Conlin, Al Bridge, Raymond Walburn, and Harry Hayden. This gallery of small-town types are more than happy to elevate Woodrow to near-messiah status, and the gullibility of the common man is demonstrated to its utmost.

Pretending to be what he is not is tortuous to Woodrow, and his agony becomes more serious as the film goes on. One Marine (Freddie Steele) is obsessed with making Woodrow look good for his mother, and when Woodrow tries to back out, things get violent. Mother love is dangerous.

Finally, Woodrow confesses publicly, in a deeply dramatic scene that the film has somehow prepared the viewer for. He plans to leave town, and his girl says she’ll go with him. The town turns out en masse – not to lynch him, but to applaud his honesty and modesty, and to ask him to continue to run for mayor. The improbably happy ending works, and off the magic-making Marines go, to the salutes of the crowd and the clangor of a brass band.

In a time when there were plenty of dead heroes to go around on the home front, to spoof the role of the hero in a society eager for heroes is merciless. The self-delusion of the entire society is brought to bear on Woodrow, the unwitting martyr. We are happy with fake heroism, if it comes with a good story. (The Marines tell more and more outrageous stories of Woodrow’s valor.)

By film’s end, any rational viewer has had their assumptions turned inside out expertly. Sturges’ comedies are not without their moral observations. Sturges had extreme reservations about mankind’s intelligence and integrity – but he always manages to reward the underdog by the end of the film.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Jammin’ the Blues.