Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Hail the Conquering Hero
1944 · Preston Sturges · Hail the Conquering Hero on Sightlines
Two brass bands meet Woodrow Truesmith's train, and neither one will stop playing so the other can be heard. The town has organized a welcome so loud it cannot hear itself. The man it is for got out of the Marines on hay fever and never left the country.
Stay on that platform a minute, because everything Sturges is doing is already in it.
Deleuze's account of classical Hollywood runs on a circuit he calls the action-image: someone takes in a situation, something in them tightens, they act, and the world comes out different because they acted. The grandest version he calls the large form. A situation so big it surrounds everyone inside it presses down until one person does one decisive thing. His word for that surrounding pressure is the synsign, the encompasser, and Hail has a beauty of one: America at war in 1944, with its bunting, its town square, its gold-star mothers, its flat assumption that a young man in uniform comes with a story you already know.
Sturges builds the encompasser at full strength. Then he removes the single part that makes the machine turn. Woodrow cannot act.
This is worth stopping over, because Deleuze dates the breakdown of the action-image to after the war, to Italian rubble and men who can only watch. Sturges gets there in 1944, at Paramount, in a comedy, because shame does to a man roughly what bombing does to a city. And note the shape of it: Woodrow perceives more clearly than anyone else in the picture. He is the only person in town seeing straight. What fails is the other half of the circuit. Every act available to him makes things worse, since each attempt to confess or retreat only deepens the town's investment. The link between perceiving and acting does not snap so much as reverse polarity. Bracken plays it as physical illness, sweating and stammering and morally stuck, and Sturges stages it as capture: the Marines hemming him in on all sides, the crowd lifting him off the ground and carrying him. A man moved bodily by forces he cannot stop. That is what a severed sensory-motor circuit looks like when it is funny.
What takes over as the film's actual agent is the town. Deleuze borrows an odd word for a crowd filmed as one feeling rather than many people: the dividual. Seitz's deep focus makes it structural rather than thematic. A mother's face in front, a marching band behind her, a politician working the frame's edge, all evenly lit and all legible at once, so the gag arrives as one simultaneous organism instead of a series of reactions. You never cut to the crowd. It is already there, behind the head of whoever is speaking. This is the same depth Bazin was praising in exactly these years for keeping a whole situation available and letting a viewer choose where to look. Sturges uses it to make the crowd unavoidable.
Now notice that nobody in this film performs a heroic act. Heroism only ever gets staged. Deleuze names the hinge where action stops being done and starts being figured the reflection-image, and its liveliest form, taken from Eisenstein, is the attraction-image: spectacle that presents an action rather than carrying one out. That is every major sequence here. The station, the porch speeches, the mayoral draft. Valor as pageant. Its companion is the inversion-image, the sublime hero shadowed by his feeble double, and Sturges's nerve was to cast the double as the lead and leave the sublime version offscreen where it can't be checked: a dead father's record, a fabricated wound. The one man onscreen who has actually been to the war is Freddie Steele's shell-shocked Marine, fixated on his own dead mother, and it is his damage that sets the lie going. There is a hole in the floor of this comedy.
The laughter comes from a precise place, and Deleuze has a category for it. In the relation-image, the meaning lives in a relation the audience holds and the characters do not. A uniform is what he'd call a mark, an object that means by habit, so that seeing it you expect the war behind it. Woodrow is the demark: the same object with its chain snapped, an anomaly that forces you to interpret instead of recognize. The town never sees it. We never stop seeing it. Every joke in the picture is the distance between those two facts, which is why Gilmore's cutting swings so insistently between swelling public spectacle and one cornered private face. Deleuze calls that convergent alternation the organic American montage, the classical rhythm of parallel lines closing on one point. Sturges aims it at a confession instead of a rescue.
None of this arrived from nowhere. Christmas in July is the same engine at lower pressure, a nervous nobody acclaimed for something he didn't earn and riding it until he has to say so out loud. The Great McGinty supplied the vernacular of small-town machinery, a nobody raised up by a system that needs a face; Hail runs the con with a Marine legend where the ballot box was. Nothing Sacred had already worked out how press and mob manufacture a beloved figure nobody actually looks at. Twentieth Century set the tempo, escalating-impostor farce driven by overlapping talk, which is why the editing here is paced to dialogue rather than to glances.
The large debt is Capra. Meet John Doe handed over the manufactured folk hero whole, Mr. Smith the crowd oratory and mass-enthusiasm tableaux. Sturges takes the mechanism and leaves the sincerity behind. Capra's crowd is redeemable and its faith is the argument. Sturges's crowd is credulous and dangerous and right only by accident, and then he forgives it anyway. That last move is the film's most disputable and best decision.
Going forward, the film's clearest inheritance runs through its own crew. Watch the melancholy passages, the only place Seitz drops the even high-key and lets shadow into Woodrow's face. Months later he took that gradient to Double Indemnity. The shame in this comedy is lit like the guilt in that thriller.
What it did for the art: Sturges had already won the right to direct his own scripts, which cracked open a door writers have been walking through ever since. He proved that a satire aimed at the sanctity of the combat hero could be made, cleared, and released while the war was still on. And he built a crowd out of overlapping voices, competing brass, and protests colliding, a soundscape American ensemble cinema would rediscover decades later and treat as new.
The question he leaves open is the one his ending steps around. The confession works because the town turns out to be decent. But Sturges has just spent the whole picture showing you a machine that makes a public man out of nothing, and the machine has no opinion about what it makes. He shows you the mechanism, then lets it run kindly. Mercy, or evasion? I'm not sure the film knows.
Watch it again with your eyes off Bracken. Watch the back of the frame, the faces behind his head, doing the film's thinking. And watch for the moment the noise stops.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Woodrow perceives his situation with total clarity and can do nothing with it: every attempt to confess or retreat only deepens the town's investment. Bracken plays it as sweating, stammering moral paralysis while the Marines hem him in and the crowd lifts and carries him bodily.
- action-image, large form — The SAS' structure held intact: a vast wartime situation presses on one man until a single decisive act — the public confession — transforms it and the town forgives him.
- the encompasser (synsign) — Wartime small-town America as the surrounding situation that calls forth action: bunting, the town square, the affectionately exact front-porch iconography, the dead father's combat record, the assumption that a uniform carries a story.
- the dividual — Seitz's even high-key lighting and deep focus keep a mother's face, a marching band, and a scheming politician simultaneously legible, so the town reads as one affective organism rather than a set of reactions; the crowd literally lifts and carries Woodrow.
- attraction-image — No heroic act is ever performed; heroism is only staged. The escalating public tableaux — competing marching bands at the station, the porch-front speeches, the mayoral draft — present valor as pageant.
- inversion-image — The sublime hero exists only offscreen, in the dead father's real record and the fabricated wound, while the lead is his feeble double; Freddie Steele's shell-shocked Marine, fixated on his own dead mother, is the film's one genuine combat veteran and its most damaged figure.
- the relation-image (mental-image) — The comedy runs entirely on a relation the audience holds and no character in the town does — we know the combat record is fabricated from the first scene, and every gag is the distance between our knowledge and theirs.
- demark — The Marine uniform and the wound story mean by customary chain (see the uniform, assume the war); Woodrow wears both with the chain snapped, an anomaly the town cannot perceive and the viewer cannot stop perceiving.
- organic American montage — Stuart Gilmore's parade and rally cutting intercuts the swelling public spectacle with Woodrow's mounting private panic, two convergent lines closing on the confession rather than on a rescue.