A Film Canon

Hail The Conquering Hero fufils the military satire lurking around the margins of Morgan's Creek. As in the earlier film, Eddie Bracken plays a small-town boy - Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith - thwarted in his dreams of military service. In this case, however, a group of renegade Marines co-opt him into a scam that involves replacing mild asthma with battle wounds as the reason for his discharge, thereby launching his home town into a patriotic frenzy. Although Bracken is memorable, the film belongs to the head of the Marines, who culminates the persona played by William Demarest in Sturges' oeuvre, as well as clarifying it - and this later strand of that oeuvre - in terms of an identification of America with opportunism, rather than individualism; or, alternatively, an explication of individualism as opportunism, explaining Demarest's curious ability to imbue his duplicity with an endearing, demotic wholesomeness. The result is an artful subversion of militarism, which consists not so much in contradicting it as in raising it to a slightly hysterical pitch - Capra on speed - as evinced both in a continuation of the chaotic, violent subtext of Morgan's Creek, as well as a hyperbolic conflation of different rhetorical registers, of which Truesmith's name is the mere epitome. From this perspective, the central conflict - both military and romantic - occurs between Truesmith and the insatiable, frequently aggressive, patriotism of his neighbours, which ultimately supervenes his revelation of the truth, proving that "Politics is a very peculiar thing...if they want you, they want you. They don't need reasons any more. They find their own...it's just like when a girl wants a man."