Screen:

...Sturges wasn't cynical, just smart...

...prints...

...This comes naturally . to somebody who looks at the world in a rather skewed way anyhow, as Sturges did...

...Instead, he tells the truth, except that he takes all the blame on himself and lionizes his friends in the Marines...

...He decides that Woodrow mustn't disappoint his...

...For once, a comedy doesn't need to escape the dilemma it has created...

...He was corrupted to a certain extent by his own perceptiveness about how the system works in this country...

...Eddie Bracken, who came to see himself in Hail the Conquering Hero at the retrospective, told the audience there a wonderful story about the making of the film...

...I adore the way you handle Handel!'' he tells the conductor...

...Up until now, the movie has only been fast-paced, lunatic, and hilarious...

...He has to make even marginal characters and throw-away lines count...

...But they figure - what the heck - they've still got a weekend left on their passes...

...He only seemed to be because he had too sharp an insight into his own times...

...I always feel cheated out of my laughter when that happens...

...This character's most expressive gesture is to chew a toothpick...

...to play them...

...Then they'll have to give it 'A' advertising, and it'll have a much better chance of being a hit...

...To do that, a, writer-director like Sturges has to generate a lot of material...

...While Sturges was not really cynical, he was perhaps a bit jaundiced about life...

...What makes the stock characters in his films unusually funny is that they are figures seen out of the corner of the mind's eye, with the distortion that peripheral vision always gives to things...

...All the nonsense out on the edges of Sturges's films originated in some central part of him that was highly moral...

...This is supposed to be a-'B' picture," Sturges confided...

...All the great comedies that Sturges made during the '40s, from McGinty through Unfaithfully Yours, are sustained by character roles and bit parts like this...

...The point Sturges is making is not one that has ever been popular with Americans, and never less so than as they emerged victorious from World War II...

...He wanted to populate his movies with talented comics, performers he could trust to get a laugh no matter how small the scene or part...

...His father died in World War I; and Woodrow is so chagrined at not getting a chance to do likewise in the Second World War, he has been duping his dear old mom and the other folks back home into thinking he is overseas...

...They're stereotypes seen in some peculiar new way, given odd twists of character that make them unique...

...The independence of his way of looking at things becomes apparent at the end of Hail the Conquering Hero, when Woodrow is elected mayor on the reform ticket because everyone in town thinks he's a war hero...

...Woodrow boys them a beer, so they adopt him...

...In 1944 in America, this was a very peculiar way to look at the world...

...This of course makes Woodrow, in our eyes, a far greater hero than he could have become on any battlefield...

...The opening scene has a very complicated shot where the camera has to travel from the Marines at their table down the bar to Woodrow drinking his beer...

...It is that moral courage is far harder to come by than mere physical courage...

...Sturges recognized the importance of such roles so clearly that he maintained his own stock company (Demarest, Pangborn, Porter Hall, Almira Sessions, Raymond Walburn, et al...

...Sturges was a master of character roles, and what makes them funny is that they're not just stereotypes...

...Even James Agee, who should have known better, accused him of this in a review...

...This isn't a terribly profound point for a movie to make, and Sturges doesn't belabor it...

...Screen PRESENT LAUGHTER ECCENTRIC BUT SMART COMEDY IS JUST looking at the world in an eccentric way, taking a peculiar point of view toward events that, seen from another angle, might be tragic or revolting or merely ordinary...

...A classic example is Preston Sturges's 1944 film Hail the Conquering Hero, which was recently revived in New York as part of a Sturges retrospective featuring beautiful, new 35 mm...

...You see...

...As I've pointed out before in this column, the secret to making comedies is to keep the pace lively...

...He's the perfect parody of the tough guy in a '30s movie...

...Having an eccentric view of the world made Sturges, along with other great comedians like Socrates, a bit of a gadfly...

...Still, it is the point that the entire movie has been leading up to...

...They are a very odd lot, the oddest being a grim-faced, shell-shocked youngster who was obviously screwy in, the first place and who, being an orphan, is craziest of all about other people's mothers...

...His powers of perception, and the course of his career, were rather like Robert Airman's...

...Between them and an equally daffy group of men on the civvy side - a gang of corrupt politicians against whose mayor (Franklin Pangborn) the reformers draft Woodrow to run - this movie turns out to be one of the brightest American comedies ever made...

...In Unfaithfully Yours, the high note is a private detective whom the central character, a renowned conductor (Rex Harrison), expects to be the usual shifty, low-life type...

...Sturges got this shot on his first attempt, Bracken said, but then spent an entire day doing retakes of it...

...But if I can run it over budget just enough, it'll become an 'A' picture...

...Both directors had in them one decade of great filmmaking, after which their work declined...

...Sturges wasn't cynical, though...

...It is the presence of the platoon of nut cases, and especially of Demarest as the Sarge, that really keeps things rolling...

...He hasn't wanted any of the adulation his imposture has brought, and now, as he stands before the crowd at town hall to make his acceptance speech, he can't do it...

...You might guess from Woodrow's middle names that the military is something of a tradition in his family...

...The Sarge (William Demarest), who is only slightly less wacky and tight-lipped than Woodrow's sponsor in this fiasco, even stuffs Woodrow into a spare uniform for the occasion...

...As the movie opens, he is in a bar drowning his sorrows when in comes a platoon of Marines home on leave, bristling with decorations, and broke...

...His talent for this sort of thing is already apparent in the first film he both wrote and directed, The Great McGinty (1940), where there is a thug in whom the icy calm and impassivity of the hired killer is so extreme that it becomes more like the pasty-faced blandness of a clerk or a tailor...

...Buf when Woodrow and his pals arrive home to find that the whole town has turned out to give him a hero's welcome, the fun begins in earnest...

...When the other guys in the platoon find out what their buddy has done, they commiserate with Woodrow...

...In his own day, Sturges was thought of as a cynic...

...It doesn't have to end with an evasion or a gimmick...

...To be sure Woodrow doesn't, in fact, he calls her up to say her son has been mustered out after a tough tour of duty in the Pacific, and he'll be home on the next train...

...Instead, he turns out to be a music-lover...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.STERBECK, JR...

...Finally Bracken, exasperated, asked Sturges why he kept repeating the shot when he already had it in the can...

...In this movie the war heroes are a bunch of mugs, and a helpless young man named Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (Eddie Bracken), who's been given a medical discharge for hay fever, is the hero...

...Perhaps the fairest way to describe his point of view would be not as peculiar, but as independent, free from many of the prejudices, predispositions, and assumptions of his time...

...They might as well escort the reluctant hero home...

...Because it doesn't do this, Hail the Conquering Hero has a certain wholeness that's very satisfying...