Hail the Conquering Hero

Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944) You can take "Semper Fi" just a little too far sometimes. Small-town schnook Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken) is drinking alone in a bar. Washed out of his beloved Marine Corps for chronic hay fever, he's been working in a San Diego shipyard ever since and writing letters, full of fiction, to his Mom, a Marine widow, that he's fighting overseas. He spots a group of jarheads (led by Sturges regular William Demarest) trying to buy a communal beer with 15¢ between 'em, and buys them a round.

When they hear his tale of woe and subterfuge, the Marines take sympathetic pity on Woodrow, and concoct a story that reads like an invasion plan. Just back from Guadalcanal, they pin their medals on the kid, insist on escorting him home, and make up a cock-and-bull story about him being a hero. Anything for dear ol' Mom. But, as things tend to do in Sturges comedies, things accelerate in a dither of cross-purposes and crushed dialogue. Caught up in the manufactured patriotic fervor, the whole town sings Woodrow's praises, the bank forgiving Mom's mortgage and nominating him for Mayor (with the election only two days away!). Woodrow's genuinely appalled, but the Marines are steadfast in seeing Woodrow's dreams come true, no matter how much he protests, no matter how much he whines. No matter how much guilt he feels.

It took some guts for Sturges to make a story about blind hero-worship and unquestioning patriotic fervor during war-time (it would be controversial today and must have been even more so during the time of its release during the second World War), but emboldened by a basic cynicism (and his typical questioning of tropes), Sturges does a strafing run on a veritable gallery of targets (with the military even cooperating with the filming!) Sturges takes pot-shots at bankers, small-town in-bred politicians and the insanity of mob-rule, yet still manages to make a fairly sunny picture with a lot of laughs and a hero who's anything but.

Part of the charm of Hail the Conquering Hero is Truesmith as played by Eddie Bracken. Not much to look at, kinda dumpy with a nose that follows the slope of his fore-head without benefit of eyebrow ridges, Bracken has the same voice and manner of Mickey Rooney, a ferocity of energy and a quick way of delivering lines with maximum inflection. That he spends the entire movie frustrated, bitter and cynical doesn't lessen his appeal one jot, which is, frankly, amazing—it's something even James Stewart couldn't pull off in The Philadelphia Story (despite winning the Oscar for it).

Hail, the Conquering Hero has a couple Pacific Northwest connections: the ingenue is played by Ella Raines, who was born in the little town of Snoqualmie Falls, Washington, and is something of a noir icon for her titular role in "Phantom Lady"; and one of the Marines is played by a mug with a mushed-in face named Freddie Steele.

 

Steele was a professional middleweight boxer in the Pacific Northwest with an astounding record of wins-losses and draws of 125-5-11. Noted for his pile-driver punches, he was known as "The Tacoma Assassin," before a punch broke his breast-bone (ouch!) and he gave up the ring for the movies. He ran a legendary restaurant in Westport for many years, and his role as the one Marine who thinks that Trueblood may not deserve the false-god praise he gets is the most satisfying of the emotional through-lines in Hail, the Conquering Hero.

Sullivan's Travels

Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941) Entertaining 1941 "message picture"..."with a little sex in it."

 

Big Deal studio comedy director John L. Sullivan has a case of "Hamlet disease,"* and wants the studio to bankroll a serious picture (for a change!) about poverty—entitled "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?"**—but while the brass haggle over whether they want to do it or not to appease their big bread-winner, "Sully" (Joel McCrea) decides to dress the part and go amongst the poor and down-trodden for a little research. After all, he's a rich Hollywood mucky-muck—what does he know about poverty (other than he's against it)? Early on in his plan, a girl (Veronica Lake, playing "The Girl"), who is down on her own luck trying to get acting jobs, uses her last thirty cents to buy the poor schlub some breakfast at a diner. Sully gets the guilts, and tells her of his idea, and ropes her into the scheme.

The two then skip the studio publicity-mill buttinski-bus that's been set up to track their moves as they spend the next few days hopping freights, eating at soup kitchens, and sleeping at flop-houses. The movie fairly careens like the Keystone Cops with changes of tone from earnest pathos to roaring comedy: the poor are saintly (though one thief is particularly verminous), while the rich Beverly Hills folk, they are a foolish bunch. And (one must admit) Sully's "experiment" falls a bit short in the stakes department when he and The Girl can easily abandon it at a moment's whim (although Sturges does insure a more authentic experience, just to ensure that his point gets made).

Ultimately, the film seems just a tad self-justifying in that a comedy film-maker is making a comedy about why comedies are needed. One would think that Sully could read the trades and see how well his movies were doing and come to the same conclusion. But, the point is made—and made often—that the well-to-do Hollywood types haven't a clue about a world that isn't butlered and chauffered and catered...to their every need.

But let's not quibble. The movie is a great construction with Sturges' rock solid writing delivering a punch or punch-line every third line or so, all delivered at a break-neck pace by his stable of regulars and McCrea, whose sense of light comedy was impeccable, and Veronica Lake, who was never better than the breezy blonde who goes along for the ride.

Sullivan's Travels is the brightest star of the Preston Sturges series of Paramount comedies. If it can lead one to seeking out the rest of this too-overlooked writer-director's films, then that's gravy.

Sullivan's Travels was voted into the United States National Film Registry in 1990 for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It is all that and also damned entertaining. And sometimes that's all you can hope for in this cockeyed caravan.

 

* When a comedian yearns to play Hamlet to prove his range...and be taken seriously.

** Yes, this is where the Coen Brothers got it.

Hey, that's Preston Sturges in the background playing the director!

Christmas in July (1940)

Yeah, no. Don't worry. We're not going to start reviewing Hallmark Channel movies. It just seemed appropriate to revive this fine Preston Sturges movie. More are on the way.

Christmas in July (Preston Sturges, 1941) James MacDonald (Dick Powell) lives a life of pretense and dreams. A bean counter for a coffee company, he's just won the $25,000 prize in the slogan contest for rival caffeine-pushers, Maxford House. The winning entry: "Can't sleep at night? It's not the coffee. It's the bunk." 

Well, it is the bunk and the pretenses are false ones. MacDonald didn't win any contest. It's all an impractical joke played on him by co-workers, that manages to sneak under the radar due to a contest SNAFU. But by the end of his perfect day, he's got a promotion, a new raise and an office, and bought presents for everybody on the block without spending a dime yet. You've got to have good luck to get good luck it seems, but it all comes crashing down when the check and everything with it bounces. Jimmy almost loses his new job because, let's face it, he only got it because he won the contest and, his boss, liking sure things and having made a ton of mistakes himself, needs to have something he can count on. Now that he can't count on MacDonald being a proven winner, well...

That twisted logic—the very basis of our banking credit system (You can only get money if you don't need it) forms the curvature of the spine of Sturges' short (68 minutes) winning second film. Another moral, Sturges-style is a familiar one, except in Hollywood: No good deed goes unpunished. MacDonald buys presents for everybody but himself and ends up humiliated in front of his neighbors. But at least he gets to keep his new job if he succeeds at it because "it's one thing to muff a chance once you've had it... it's another thing never to have had a chance."

Powell does measured work far subtler than his musical gigs and ingenue Ellen Drew is delightful. But the stand-out among the Sturges stock company in this film is Raymond Walburn as the perpetually frustrated and passive aggressive Dr. Maxford, head of Maxford House Coffee. Usually these big business CEO's are played with comedy bluster, but Walburn fumes and fusses as if its as part of his everyday routine as a cup of coffee, roasted and aged. The entire movie has a fresh comic timing that's a bit off-kilter, and the results are hilarious. 

It's a Frank Capra movie turned on his ear, but far more cynical and with less of a "reach" at the end. It's "good to the last gulp."

The Great Moment

 The Great Moment (Preston Sturges, 1943) I'm sure there were many dust-ups in the relationship between movie-maker Preston Sturges and the studio financing his films, Paramount Pictures, but this is the one that soured the deal. Not really a comedy (but not a straight historical film, either) The Great Moment tells the story of Dr. W.T.G. Morton (Joel McCrea) the dentist who is credited (amongst a great many dis-creditors) of perfecting painless surgery, or what we now refer to as the practice of anesthesiology, at the time an accomplishment as fanciful as breaking the sound barrier, much less powered flight.

It provided another exercise for Sturges to explore non-linear story-telling, and, indeed, Sturges jumps all over the place in the story, starting first* with Morton in triumph over the Main Titles, then moving to the end of the story with the doctor dead, unheralded and even vilified, and his widow recalling the struggles that the dentist went through, after the discovery and the challenges to his claims, including an ill-advised patent pursuit (done at the urging of President Franklin Pierce who passed the matter onto Morton to create a federal test-case). Only after an explanation of the down-fall, does Sturges then tell the tale of the days before the discovery, with the dentist's work and struggles, the comedic failures and the life-threatening ones, ending with the acknowledgement of the scientific community of his discovery and methods. "Here, everything changes" are the last words of the movie.

They might just as well have been "No good deed goes unpunished."

Seeking a patent for the method, Morton is forced to reveal his secret in order to save a life and it is then appropriated by the military during the Civil War. With the cat out of the medicine bag, Morton pursues the unresolved patent question, and is castigated in the Press for his selfishness and anti-humanitarianism. It would hardly be an inspiring story in chronological order, and would influence anybody to walk out of a theater muttering "Guess I'd better stop messing around with that cold fusion idea."

For Sturges, it was a challenge to make a popular entertainment out of what is a downer story in a straight chronological timeline and, instead, taking the audience to a more satisfying conclusion, going from tragedy to triumph (even if he has to bend time to do it). But, its flashback structure irked the Paramount brass, and they withheld the film for two years (during which Sturges would make The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero to much acclaim), finally releasing it after Sturges' contract had run out and he'd moved on to potentially sunnier pastures. In those two years, the film had been re-edited, re-titled, and comedic elements added—I detect a clumsily inserted women's scream (and the same one) inserted three times in the film for use in both horrific and comedy situations.

How much of what we now know as The Great Moment is actually part of Sturges' plan and how much is studio interference is readily apparent from a reading of Sturges' original screenplay.** It was Sturges' intention to tell the story in an intricate flashback structure, while, simultaneously making Morton's work relatable to modern audiences.  It still resonates to this day, with the privatization of medical breakthroughs through the study of cell and DNA research; should an entity, corporate or individual, profit from work that could benefit mankind, or even save a life?

In the meantime, there is this film, slightly disjointed by design or by malice,*** the last of Sturges' Paramount films to be released, and the only film Sturges made for the studio that did not make a profit (although it was brought in ahead of schedule and below its budget). Its reputation, like the Morton patent lawsuit, would hang over its extraordinary creator for the rest of his career, which never achieved the same heights as it once had. 

No good deed goes unpunished.

Dr. Morton and Preston Sturges

* Well, not so much.  You can't trust anything in the Paramount botched version of Sturges' film, which he intended to call "Triumph Over Pain."  Sturges' screenplay starts in modern times as a young boy is about to go into surgery.


** The screenplay has been published and can be found here. 

*** Paramount can be counted on to completely botch a film from time to time.  I remember going to the Seattle International Film Festival, specifically, to see Sergio Leone's long-in-the-preparation gangster film Once Upon a Time in America and was horrified to find a disjointed, flawed film that seemed to go on forever.  What was presented there was a re-edited Paramount Pictures version, cut in chronological order, completely destroying Leone's intentions to present it in a complicated flashback structure—that managed to give away a central mystery, and robbed the film, which would prove to be Leone's last, of almost all of its resonance and power.  Years later, I went to see it at a repertory theater—mostly because the show-times indicated a longer cut—and was amazed to see a version that retained the flashback structure, and, although it was an hour longer than the SIFF presentation, seemed to be a much shorter film experience. OUATIA is still a flawed film, but Leone's amazing work as a film-maker was never more apparent.