Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) is a satirical comedy-drama film written and directed by Preston Sturges, starring Eddie Bracken, Ella Raines and William Demarest, and featuring Raymond Walburn, Franklin Pangborn, Elizabeth Patterson, Bill Edwards and Freddie Steele.

In a chance encounter in a bar he buys a round of drinks for six Marines back from the Battle of Guadalcanal headed by Master Gunnery Sergeant Heffelfinger.

When they step off the train, the seemingly harmless deception has escalated beyond control; the entire town turns out to greet its homegrown hero.

He and the studio had numerous conflicts over editorial control, censorship problems and other issues on The Great Moment and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.

The studio also balked at Sturges' repeated use of the same bit actors again and again in most of his Paramount films, what has been called his "stock company" or "repertory troupe."

The studio was concerned that people would get tired of seeing the same faces, and wanted Sturges to use different actors, which he refused to do: "I always replied that these little players who had contributed so much to my first hits had a moral right to work in my subsequent pictures.

After another unsuccessful preview – and, not coincidentally, after The Miracle of Morgan's Creek had been released and become a smash hit[5] – DeSylva accepted Sturges' offer to return, unpaid, and rewrite the script.

[10] Sharp-eyed viewers may have noted that in the scene where the Marines leave the Oakdale station, a billboard behind them advertises The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, the film that Sturges made, also starring Eddie Bracken, immediately before this one.

[11] Reviews were uniformly excellent, with Bosley Crowther writing in the New York Times that it was "one of the wisest [movies] ever to burst from a big-time studio."

One writer described Hail the Conquering Hero as "a satire on mindless hero-worship, small-town politicians, and something we might call "Mom-ism," the almost idolatrous reverence that Americans have for the institution of Motherhood," and Sturges himself said that of all his films, it was "the one with the least wrong with it."

The film has the normal hallmarks of Sturges' best work: an extremely fast pace, overlapping dialogue, and rapid-fire punch lines.