an honest man
by Douglas Messerli
Preston
Sturges (writer and director) Hail the
Conquering Hero / 1944
Preston
Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero is
one of his very finest comedies—which given the quality of most of his work is
very high praise indeed. And, although nearly all his films are grounded in
American culture, in its presentation of patriotic marines and small-town
character types, it perhaps his most American work.
In a local bar, Woodrow coincidentally
runs into a group of down-and-out Marines who have just spent their last dime.
Treating them to a round of beers and sandwiches, Woodrow and the soldiers
strike up a conversation wherein he reveals his situation. The eldest of the men,
Sgt. Heppelfinger (the wonderful William Demarest) has even served with “Hinky
Dinky” in World War I, recalling his heroic acts. While they speak, one of the
soldiers, missing his own family, scolds Woodrow for not returning home and
puts through a call to Woodrow’s mother so that he might tell her the truth.
Regretfully, Woodrow reveals he will be returning home but in the bad telephone
connection his admission of having “hay fever” is comprehended in the Truesmith
kitchen as “jungle fever,” which leads his mother to believe he has been
released as a kind of hero, having suffered in a battle. The whole event is
even more complicated when Heppelfinger jumps on the line declaring Woodrow is a
hero! Before the despairing ex-soldier has he comprehended the immensity of the
Sergeant’s lie, he is bundled away by the soldiers onto a train, forced to
redress in his uniform and awarded a couple of their medals, temporarily, so
that he can return home proudly to his hometown.
With great cornball hoopla, bands play,
a young girl gives her memorized speech, and the mayor blusters forward as
Woodrow is carried through the streets in absolute horror for the series of
out-of-control deceptions and their consequences. At every attempt to speak
out, however, his Marine friends jump forward to silence him, leaving Bracken
with little to say other than his representing his growing fears in a
permanently-popeyed and dyspeptic look. A statue is planned, his mother’s
remaining mortgage paid, each kindness further terrorizing the former truth-teller,
while town citizens determine to draft him into running against the current
mayor! It is a world gone mad, a community so desperate for heroes that the
good and ordinary are seem as meaningless.

The stunned crowd is left in the always
capable counterfeiting hands of Sgt. Heppelfinger, who praises Woodrow’s true
courage in confessing the truth, which convinces the hypocritical citizens that
Woodrow does indeed have the qualities they want from a mayor, drawing him back
into fold before he can escape!
Sgt. Heppelfinger: [after Woodrow reveals his discharge and leaves
the auditorium]
I just wanna tell you one thing, see.
I've seen a lot of brave men in my life—that's my
business. But what that kid just done took real
courage.
Sturges hardly misses a single aspect of
American small-town hypocrisy: the mother’s embracement of the dead, the
lover’s disloyalty, the mayor’s puffed-up chicanery, the soldiers' absolute
delight in their own outrageous fables, even the church-goers disingenuous love
of their fellow flock (only after believing Woodrow is a hero do they help his
penniless mother). In short Sturges presents a small town world we all know
from tales as vastly different as Tilbury Town, Winesburg, Ohio, and River
City, Iowa, towns in which ordinary people are only too ready to buy into
fraudulent myths of American desire.
Los Angeles,
August 10, 2012
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