Hail the Conquering Hero
Preston Sturges (1944)
In The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, the orphan played by Eddie Bracken had been rejected by the armed forces on medical grounds. The predicament of Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith, whom Bracken plays in Hail the Conquering Hero, is even worse. As his names make clear, Woodrow comes from a family with a proud military history. His father was a marine who died a hero in World War I, on the very day his son was born. Woodrow has been raised by his mother with the ambition to serve his country in the marines. In World War II, he achieves that ambition but only for a month, before he’s discharged on account of chronic hay fever. Woodrow goes to work in a San Diego shipyard but, fearful of disappointing his mother, he tells her that he’s fighting overseas. In the opening scene of Hail the Conquering Hero, Woodrow is gloomily propping up the bar in a club, reflecting on his ignominious failure. Enter a group of six marines, who are back from the Battle of Guadalcanal and low on funds after losing a crap game. Woodrow buys them a drink, then another and tells his sad story.
One of the marines is appalled by the lie Woodrow has told his mother at a time when many mothers’ sons really are departing on active service abroad, never to return. The marine there and then puts a call through to Mrs Truesmith of Oak Ridge, California. He reassures her that her son is fine but has received a medical discharge – Woodrow is dragged unwillingly to the phone to confirm this to his mother. Sergeant Heffelfinger, the senior member of the group of marines, takes an immediate shine to Woodrow when he discovers he’s the son of ‘Hinky Dinky’ Truesmith, whom Heffelfinger fought alongside in the previous war. He and his men take Woodrow back to Oak Ridge. During the train journey, at Heffelfinger’s insistence, he swaps jackets with one of the other marines: Woodrow’s new outfit is embellished with the 1st Marine Division Battle Blaze and Pacific Theatre of Operations medals. Not that he really needs these proofs of valour. His home town has already decided that the younger Truesmith has followed in his father’s footsteps. A horrified Woodrow steps off the train to a returning hero’s welcome from crowds of his fellow citizens. With a mayoral election in the offing, the war hero is put up as a candidate to oppose the arrogant incumbent. When Woodrow tries to protest that he’s not the man they think he is, his supporters chuckle at his false modesty.
The opening titles sequence – featuring, as well as Handel on the soundtrack, the comical profile of a laurel-crowned Eddie Bracken engraved on a commemorative medal – gets Hail the Conquering Hero off to a fine start. For the next hour, Preston Sturges works out the central comic premise of the story ingeniously and thoroughly. Eddie Bracken plays the lead here straighter than in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. Although Bracken isn’t greatly varied, Woodrow’s exasperated anxiety grows and deepens, as the implications of the lies about his war record continue to expand. The exuberant physical comedy is rationed compared with Morgan’s Creek and has consequently stronger impact. In a scene in which Woodrow attempts to escape from his bedroom, which the marines are guarding, Eddie Bracken brings off expertly a succession of pratfalls and collisions with a door. When Woodrow, with the help of one of the marines, devises a plan to escape back to military service, Bracken’s temporary switch into determined cheerfulness is bracing. The plan is soon foiled, however, by the same marine who made the original call to Mrs Truesmith. Woodrow, desperate to extricate himself from the tangled web that’s been weaved on his behalf, comes clean, at a mayoral campaign rally, about his wartime activities.
The confession signals a major shift in the film’s tone and a loss of energy. It’s as if Sturges’s determination to extract every drop of comic juice from the situation has exhausted him. The brisk satire of hero-worship, political manoeuvring and the fickleness of public opinion (all reminiscent of The Great McGinty) gives way to an essentially straight-faced illustration of the truth that there’s more than one kind of bravery. Woodrow’s mother weeps as she hears her son at the rally but his audience realises how much courage it took for him to reveal all. Woodrow prepares to depart Oak Ridge in shame and sadness but the locals decide they want him, more than ever, to stand for mayor. The moral lesson is one you expect from a film-maker more conventional than Preston Sturges. The last part of Hail the Conquering Hero isn’t wholly disappointing – Eddie Bracken has a surprisingly quiet and affecting moment as Woodrow packs his suitcase to leave – but it feels wrong. The story has fallen out of its comic frame and the attempts to push it back in have an uncertainty of tone unusual for this director. (Manny Farber was particularly offended by the sequence in which Woodrow, at the railway station to catch the first train out of town, is confronted by an advancing crowd, headed by Sergeant Heffelfinger, which Sturges presents as a parody of a lynch mob.)
Woodrow was so ashamed by his medical discharge that, as well as informing his mother (Georgia Caine) that he’d been posted overseas, he wrote to tell his sweetheart Libby (Ella Raines) that they were through. During Woodrow’s absence from Oak Ridge, Libby, who works as secretary to Everett J Noble (Raymond Walburn), the foolish, vainglorious mayor, has become engaged to his son, Forrest (Bill Edwards) – Forrest isn’t away on active service because he too has chronic hay fever. Ella Raines’s best moment comes when Forrest asks Libby if she feels differently about him now that Woodrow has returned home and she replies:
‘No, I don’t. I feel just exactly the same about you as I’ve always felt, that you’re upright … and honorable, and tall and handsome, and, and wealthy and exactly what any girl in her right mind would hope for.’
Ella Raines conveys perfectly Libby’s insisting to herself that there are sound rational reasons for marrying a man she doesn’t love. The moment is also a nice anticipation of one near the end of the movie, when Doc Bissell (Harry Hayden) – the decent liberal candidate who has failed repeatedly in election contests against Mayor Noble – tells Woodrow the people still want him to stand in the coming election:
‘Politics is a very peculiar thing, Woodrow. If they want you, they want you. They don’t need reasons anymore … they find their own reasons. It’s just like when a girl wants a man.’
Bissell’s lines (which got a laugh in NFT3 probably thanks to Donald Trump) are echoed by what Libby, who has broken off her engagement to Forrest and gone back to Woodrow, then says:
‘That’s right. You don’t need reasons. Although they’re probably there.’
These words confirm Libby as a markedly less subversive and less interesting Sturges heroine than some of her predecessors.
Although my favourite Preston Sturges movies (so far) are among his earlier ones, one of the pleasures of watching his work in more or less chronological order in the BFI retrospective has come in seeing why Sturges gave increasing opportunities to William Demarest. As Sergeant Heffelfinger, Demarest is able to move beyond the grouchy, uncomprehending frustration that made him so funny in The Lady Eve and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek into a characterisation that’s more supple but no less entertaining. The attempts of Heffelfinger to take matters in hand repeatedly misfire, as Papa Kockenlocker’s attempts in Morgan’s Creek also misfire, but here they’re not simply the result of bull-in-a-china-shop bad temper. They’re leavened by Heffelfinger’s fatherly soft spot for Woodrow and nostalgic feelings about the Truesmith name. The actors playing the marines are effective as a group; Bill Edwards gives a well-judged performance as Forrest Noble; and there’s particularly good work in the smaller roles from Harry Hayden as the perennial election loser, Al Bridge as Everett T Noble’s campaign manager, and Esther Howard as the mayor’s wife. Franklin Pangborn is amusing enough as the chairman of the town reception committee (though not as amusing as he was trying to keep his patience and dignity at the start of The Palm Beach Story). As Libby’s Aunt Martha, Elizabeth Patterson has to defend her cooking in much the same terms that Patterson’s maiden aunt does in the Sturges-scripted Remember the Night.
Pauline Kael’s admiring note on this film rightly draws attention to Preston Sturges’s talent for ‘verbal slapstick’. This is especially well demonstrated in the scenes in which Mayor Noble dictates a political speech, and Forrest and Libby keep trying and failing to improve its sentence structure. (The mayor’s grammar is as shaky as his self-belief is unshakeable.) As in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Sturges provides some excellent words and music – ‘Home to the Arms of Mother’, which miserable Woodrow hears performed by a club singer in the opening scene, and the rousing ‘We Want Woodrow’, chanted by his political supporters.
5 March 2016