Whereas most soldiers would find they couldn't "go home again," in 1944 Eddie Bracken's Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith, from a long line of Marine heroes, has a different problem: he can't leave, having been honorably discharged from the service due to chronic hay fever. In a town hungry for heroes, he becomes one anyway. Hail the Conquering Hero is pitched at the point of hysteria where the ticker-tape parade and the lynch-mob meet. James Harvey writes, in Romantic Comedy: "(Sturges) cut through the knot of smugnesses and self-deceptions and half-truths that the idyllic Americanists had made of the American subject matter...He used the fantasies of the common imagination (certainly his small towns were that) not just because they were tested and surefire but because they were interesting and true in some way...And through them he finds a special and excruciatingly funny way to talk about American life-a way to express its strange and often panicking energies, even its peculiar decencies, without ever telling us comforting lies about it."