Celebrate spring with a trio of movies that amuse, inspire and welcome us home.
Hail the Conquering Hero
Between 1940 and 1944, Preston Sturges became famous as the most exhilarating creator of movie comedies since the silent era, as anyone who has ever adored The Lady Eve or Sullivan’s Travels can attest. His 1944 film Hail the Conquering Hero is a little different. Oh, it’s funny, all right: Sturges’ stock company of daffy character actors and his ear for zingy one-liners are securely in place. Yet this is also a picture with eye-daubing heart. Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith (played by Eddie Bracken), the son of a sainted martyr of the Great War, is himself a Marine Corps washout thanks to chronic hay fever. He’s written letters to his mother pretending to be in the service, and he reluctantly (at the prodding of blustery Sgt. Heffelfinger, played by the splendid William Demarest) plays the role of war hero, returning to his hometown for a grand celebration. Eventually the truth must come out, and along the way Sturges balances satire with affection, while Woodrow learns a few important things about himself and his home. What is really worth celebrating, the movie asks: patriotism that makes us feel good, or a truth that leads to something deeper?
Fanny and Alexander
It’s not common to characterize the legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman as a celebratory director, but Fanny and Alexander, his 1982 magnum opus, is a wondrous testament to art and life. Its long, long opening segment is literally a celebration: a detailing of the craft and color that goes into a lavish Christmas party, circa 1907. Bergman brings a life’s worth of wisdom to chronicling both the newness of childhood and the earned glories of age, as the film shifts from soothing to harrowing and finally into a realm of acceptance. It’s also a movie about art, and the way that art transforms and gives resonance to life. (Two versions of this film exist on DVD: the 188-minute cut released to the U.S., and a full 312-minute original made for Swedish TV; if you’ve got the time, the latter is a transporting experience.)
A Prairie Home Companion
For the length of a single broadcast of Garrison Keillor’s famed radio show — the final broadcast in the movie’s fictional universe — onstage shenanigans vie with backstage drama to create a lively, wry portrait of a community. Being the last broadcast, an elegiac air hangs over the event; indeed, Death itself (or herself, as the case may be) is literally waiting in the wings. This warm and lovely 006 film turned out to be the final work by the radically talented director Robert Altman, whose sardonic edge keeps the movie from becoming simple, and whose work with actors unleashes a marvelous cast (Keillor is but one of a large ensemble that includes Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Tommy Lee Jones, and Kevin Kline as the radio detective Guy Noir). In the end, the party is not just a celebration of showbiz or a particular radio show, but of life itself.
