Preston Sturges #7: "Hail the Conquering Hero" (1944)

Part two of Preston Sturges' wartime farces, "Hail the Conquering Hero" is a stealthily suggestive comedy about the demythification of good old American heroism and small-town hypocrisy - a madcap gem, and if you're asking this viewer, the crowning achievement of the Sturges pantheon. 
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Eddie Bracken, who played the stammering and lovelorn Norval from "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek" reunites with Sturges in one of the more befitting and enduring - albeit brief - actor/director duos in film history. 
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Like a voodoo doll subjected to the wrath of his master's sadistic tricks, Bracken's characters endured the awkward tensions and morally prickly situations with a wide-eyed gaze and a m-m-mumbled dialect, and never so hilariously as in "Hail the Conquering Hero". 
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A hero's son, medically discharged from the Marines and shielding the news from his mother and hometown while sipping beers on the California coastline, Woodrow Truesmith (Eddie Bracken) divulges the information to a group of Marines one evening, much to his regret.
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The Marines, led by Sgt. Heppelfinger (William DeMarest), grab poor Truesmith by the collar and drag him back to his hometown, where despite his reservations, he's thrown to the welcoming committee and thrust into the town spotlight, where they ignorantly hand him the keys to the city (and a mayoral candidate seat), unaware of his disappointingly unheroic military service. 
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One can draw similarities in the way that the townspeople throw themselves at Truesmith coming home in uniform to the way that the advertising executives immediately glorify and promote the lowly desk clerk Dick Powell once they believe that he's won the tagline contest in "Christmas in July". 
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Indeed, making light of the soldiers' return home and the sheepish mentality of its citizens is a risky move, but Preston Sturges is the kind of guy who understood the various inconsistencies of life, someone who would rather laugh than sneer. [A]