492
PARTISAN REVIEW
of stock-pattern small-town types
I have ever seen crammed into one
movie. Sturges' manic handling of
Raymond Walburn as the excitable
Mayor of the town would be em–
barrassing in a junior high school
operetta. But perhaps the most of–
fensive aspect of
Hail the Con–
quering Hera
is the wallowing
self-congratulatory air with which
Sturges embraces his two-faced re–
lationship to his material. His wit–
less exploitation and
pretended
kidding of a sadistic Marine with
a mother fixation, for example, is
perfectly balanced by a cinema
mother who might have come off
the top of a box of Martha Wash–
ington candy. Sturges' strategy is
to fortify every cliche in the book,
while his slapstick, unconvincingly
masquerading as satire, thuds and
thumps and never runs down.
What little of the hideousness
and horror of the war that Hol–
lywood has eyedroppered into its
releases has been received by audi–
ences with marked distaste; the
shying-away from war films-or
for that matter anything even re–
motely touching on reality-has
become so sharply felt at the box–
office that the new production
schedules call for more and more
"comedies," musicals, and uplift
pieces. The motion picture indus–
try's most relished statement on the
war, so far as audiences are con–
cerned, is no doubt to be found in
the cretinous gagging of
Hail the
Conquering Hero.
It has been
enormously successful.
Though it is true that an actor
portraying the twenty-eighth Presi–
dent of the United States unques–
tionably appears in Mr. Zanuck's
Technicolored
Wilson,
it is more
to the point, I think, to regard it
as a musical picture--somewhat in
the tradition of those films with
Alice Faye or Betty Grable, in
which a song-and-dance vaudevil–
lian is tenderly chronicled from
lowly tank-circuit endeavors to
final achievement on the Big Time.
Music is, indeed, the
subject
of
Wilson,
its garish figure in the car–
pet. A trumpet might very well ap–
pear on the main title. According
to the advertisements for the film,
eighty-seven "beloved songs" are
played or sung in
Wilson;
and
though I got the impression that
there were even more than eighty–
seven, it serves no purpose to ques–
tion Mr. Zanuck's figure. For
three-quarters of this long and
soporific picture, which cost three–
and-a-half million dollars, an ap–
proximation of history carries on
a losing battle with vocal, orches–
tral, or band renditions of
Put on
Your Old Gray Bonnet, Hail to
the Chief, Over There, I Didn't
Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,
and
the eighty-three others, most of
them executed by one of the most
ear-shattering brass sections of all
time. Vocal choruses of
By the
Light of the Silvery Moon,
as ren–
dered by the Wilson family around
the parlor piano, are more search–
ingly documented than the First
World War, which is brushed off
rather hurriedly by way of some
old newsreel clips showing Douglas
Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and
Marie Dressler drumming up busi–
ness for the Liberty Bond Drive,
and quick glances at farmerettes,
General Pershing, and parades.
From the film's opening scene, a
