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.
"Ernie Pyle's 'Story of G.I.Joe'" (William A. Wellman, 1945) One of 2009's films designated to be preserved by the Library of Congress—and boy, does it need it, the current DVD displaying scratches, bad splices, and scenes truncated in the middle of dialogue—"The Story of G.I. Joe" was an uncommon war movie, especially for one produced in the middle of the conflict it portrayed, showing a less-varnished portrait of war and the soldiers fighting it. Done with the co-operation of the military and advice from an office-load of war correspondents, the film is an unglamorous, non-propagandistic look at the life of the common infantryman. In it, the grunt's are grimey, muddy, ass-scratching, spitting dog-faces, who get exhausted, make mistakes, leave behind fallen comrades, but keep slogging.
But then, it had to be. Ernie Pyle, a Scripps-Howard correspondent covering the European theater took the tough route with his reportage, staying out of the clean briefing rooms and jumping into the fox-holes with the entrenched common soldiers. Through the course of his work, he became a beloved go-between for the soldiers and the folks back home aching for something other than the Big Picture and the Campaign—there were plenty of other Corona jockeys to do that—but on the soldiers following orders, following dirt roads, punching through entrenched enemy forces—their kids. Pyle's writing was clear-eyed, unsentimental and just discreet enough for the censors, written usually with the help of a bottle. He won the Pulitzer for his correspondent work in 1944, and had a hand in shaping the film.
And he was the one to get William "Wild Bill" Wellman to direct the film.Wellman was an inspired choice, as he was the one who insisted on the weather-beaten look of the film. But the director was a fighter pilot in World War I, and was subject to the same inter-corps squabbling of most servicemen, and had a low opinion of the infantry, only strengthened by his run-ins with a recalcitrant Army adviser on his film "Wings." And the film has several instances of "mea culpa's" from the director,* extolling the scrappy courage of the guys with boots on the ground, as opposed to the guys with their heads in the clouds.
Burgess Meredith got a deferment to play the part of Ernie Pyle—he was picked over other actors because he wasn't well known and had an odd home-spun quality and a crusty voice that could make the tough joshing resonate with warmth. Every war film has a cuddly troop mascot, but not every film has someone ask (in humor) "Haven't you eaten this dog yet?" As the Captain in charge of the men, Robert Mitchum plays his role in the manner he used to the end of his days, looking authentic and undramatic, like he shipped in with the other ringers—only a lot taller—and hadn't slept in days, born with the weight of the world on his shoulders, but still balanced on his aching feet. Or maybe it was the mud that was holding him up.
It was the only time he was nominated for an Oscar for his acting.
Pyle never saw the movie. Two weeks before the premiere, he was killed by a sniper on Ie Island off Okinawa in the Pacific. He was still with the troops, reporting their struggles.
* Besides a couple of on-the-nose comparisons between Army and Air Force—that seem to come out of nowhere—one of the various character arcs is for an infantryman dubbed "Wingless" (played by John R. Reilly), who starts the film depressed that he was drummed out of the Air Corps but soon comes around to a respect for the common foot-soldier.
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.
