Hail the Conquering Hero (Paramount), the newest cinematic caprice from Preston Sturges (The Great McGinty, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek), beats a satirical tattoo on the American small town. But it tells a story so touching, so chock-full of human frailties and so rich in homely detail that it achieves a reality transcending the limitations of its familiar slapstick.
Expertly sandwiched between the pratfalls and the broad pie-throwing burlesque of suburban manners lies a richer comedy idea—the alchemy by which a phoney hero is transmuted from the base metal of conventional heroics to the pure gold of true heroism.
"Like Father, Like Son." Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken), an awkward, befuddled but eager son of suburbia, is the "hero." Given a rousing send-off by fellow citizens of Oakridge, Calif., he marches confidently off to war, only to be ignominiously bounced out of Marine boot camp because of his chronic hay fever. Burning with shame, he thinks of his father, Hinky Dink Truesmith, a hero who died gloriously at Belleau Wood on the day his son was born; of his mother, so proud and radiant, weeping on the station platform; of the brass bands tootling and banners proudly declaiming: "Like father, like son."
So mortified is Hinky Dink's boy that he heroically hoodwinks his mother into thinking he really is leathernecking it on Guadalcanal, writes his girl (Ella Raines) that he has fallen in love with someone else and goes miserably off to work in a shipyard.
What happens when six real Marines take Woodrow in hand and forcibly escort him home, his ill-fitting uniform bristling with extemporaneous decorations, is the stuff which makes Hail the Conquering Hero one of the year's most ingratiating pictures. When grateful townspeople solemnly burn the mortgage on the old Truesmith homestead and make plans to erect a suitable monument in the town square, Woodrow's misery seems to have reached its bearable limit. But it touches new depths when, in one of the most uproarious political campaigns in cinema history, the desperately reluctant Woodrow is nominated for Mayor.
In vain he explains that it's all a mistake, he did it for his mother's sake, and what is more he loves his mother very much. One city father simply turns to another and whispers gleefully: "See, he has a natural flair for politics." The sight of so much suffering inevitably makes Woodrow's ultimate ascent from his excruciating little comic hell an uncommonly heart-warming experience.