Preston Sturges' wartime barrage at patriotism and Momism in small-town America looks forward to the central agony of the postwar film noir--that of the soldier (or prisoner) returning "all dead inside" to a society whose surface cheerfulness he no longer understands. Hail the Conquering Hero is pitched at the point of hysteria where the ticker-tape parade and the lynch mob meet. But where most soldiers will find they "can't go home again," in 1944 Eddie Bracken has another problem: he can leave. As Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith, the scion of a long line of Marine heroes, he alone has been honorably discharged from the service due to chronic hay fever. While he contemplates a disgraceful return to the town that spawned him, he has his letters sent home by way of a Marine friend fighting in Micronesia. In San Francisco, Truesmith falls in with six Marines--led by ex-fighter Freddie Steele as a pug with a severe mother complex--who persuade him to return home dressed as a war hero in order to please his unsuspecting mother. It is not long before the pathetic poser becomes the emblem of all that is decent and good in a town hungry for heroes. As in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, much of the humor (and here, even pathos) comes from watching the stammering Eddie Bracken trying to emerge a mensch from a milquetoast, against all odds.