Sullivan’s travels
Preston Sturges
USA 1941
87m
with Joel Mcrea and Veronica Lake
Made in 1941, this has to be one of the great classic comedies. Sure, we had the work of
Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, The Marx Brothers et al, but theirs could hardly be described
as feature films with serious storylines. Sullivan's Travels manages to combine a
meaningful story with subtle moral overtones and lightness and humour. Yet it is no
simple fable.
John "Sully" Sullivan (Joel McCrea) appears to have everything. Young, handsome,
talented, he is highly prized as a director of escapist films by his Hollywood bosses. But
Sully has ideals. He wants to make films about "the suffering of humanity and the human
condition... If you pander to the public we'd still be in the horse age. We'd still be making
keystone chases, bathing beauties... I want to hold a mirror to life."
"What do you know about trouble?" responds his wise, corpulent boss. "What d'you know
about garbage cans? When did you last eat from one?"
Sullivan is stung, but instead of being deterred, his idealistic streak rises to the challenge.
"I certainly had a nerve wanting to make a picture about humanity." He informs them he
is off, with 10 cents in his pocket, for "maybe a week, maybe a month, maybe a year."
Kitted out in torn jacket, hobo's hat and ancient looking hobnail boots, Sully's butler tells
him he is not sympathetic to the caricature of the poor. "Only the morbid rich find the
topic glamorous. Rich people think of prosperity in the negative. Poverty is to be
shunned."
Sullivan's search for poverty and truth, however, is about to start. Despair at the
temporary loss of their talented director has turned to glee. "I'm using de Mille's land
yacht. It will follow you discreetly."
But escape he does. The story twists and turns, frustrations abound. "The girl" (Veronica
Lake, possibly in her most charming role) has latched onto Sully by now in the belief that
he is indeed a hobo, trying, like her, to get into Hollywood. And trouble he finds. Serious
trouble. How he gets out of it is genius indeed.
Writer/director Preston Sturges has nimbly performed this double act with rare
talent. Shot in black-and-white, the film moves with verve, wit and compassion. It
gives a unique insight into the minds of the moviemakers of yester year, in particular
of Sturges himself, in this rare satire with a conscience.
Stephanie Wolfe Murray Eye for Film
Sullivan's Travels isn't so much a film about Hollywood, nor even the human condition,
despite it being outwardly concerned with John Sullivan (Joel McCrea), a Hollywood director
who momentarily leaves behind a
million-dollar mansion to hit the
road disguised as a tramp in order
to discover the true meaning of
suffering, which his studio execs
inform him he knows little about.
“Sully” wants to make a serious
picture littered with “garbage cans”
in order to leave behind the studio
comedies he's previously made, with
titles like Hey, Hey in the
Hayloft and Ants in Your Plants of
1939. But when his butler (Robert
Greig) informs him that the topic of
poverty “is not an interesting
one…only the morbid rich would
find [it] glamorous,” writer-director
Preston Sturges unveils the film's
real concern: an interrogation of
humanism as a shield for liberalism
to hide behind. That is, after all, what Sully embodies: a true-blue boy scout with a whitecollar setup, whose economic infrastructure enables him to display compassion and empathy
with little fear of being truly struck from the confines of comfort.
Yet such a description shouldn't entail that Sturges's film is snarky or condescending in any
way; on the contrary, Sullivan's Travels mounts rigorous philosophical and sociological
inquiry through ironized consciousness raising, in which a brief taste of reality and a false
epiphany for its protagonist are ambiguously put forth as a solution to the film's dense and
almost impossibly reconcilable bevy of representational issues. To understand the depths of
Sturges's reflexivity, nearly each scene requires a double take where what's being stated by
the film's characters is taken bluntly in one sense, but read as procedural, Hollywood
hypocrisy in another. That is, characters spend much of the film's first half explaining why
filmmakers should steer clear of lingering within impoverished spaces, only for the second
half of Sullivan's Travels to do just that, given its glimpses of starvation and implied strictures
of racial prejudice, most notably in a climactic sequence set within an African-American
church.
Although issues of ethnicity are never explicitly stated or addressed, this late scene resonates
with an earlier slapstick moment, in which a chef (billed in the credits as “colored chef”)
played by Charles Moore has his face dunked in a bowl of cake batter, effectively giving him
“whiteface.”
One would be remiss to assert this moment as either a cheap gag or a flash of racial
consciousness, yet that dilemma seems to be Sturges's very point: Representation holds
significant power, certainly, but the artist is only capable of so much within even the most
rigorous work of art, whether dramatic or comedic. A film as a political act remains a form of
theorization, not practice, contrary to Sully's adamancy that his aesthetic shift can be
achieved and function as a tool for social change, so long as he gets his hands a little dirty
first. But all roads lead to Hollywood, with every deliberate attempt to escape the Tinseltown
confines landing Sully right back where he began, thanks mostly to the studio bigwigs that
can “insure him for a million.” When Sully is imprisoned for stealing his own car and a police
officer asks why he's wearing such ratty clothes, Sully quips, “I just paid my income tax.”
Whenever called to own up to his performance, Sully immediately sheds it for a return to
class-based safety. Sturges plays these moments as satirical, but seldom blinks as to whether
or not Sully is being offered as an empathetic figure.
Empathy depends on viewership, which
Sturges dynamically realizes in two
sequences focused on audience members
watching a film. In the first, Sully
accompanies two matrons to a seemingly
“serious” movie, in which Sully's sole focus is
on other audience members, including a
young boy with a whistle and an elderly
man who chomps on peanut shells.
Dialogue-free, the scene suggests its lowerclass attendees as bored and unmoved by the
matters being addressed. Contrast this with
the film's most enduring moments, where a
chain gang that Sully has been sentenced to
joins the aforementioned black church in
order to watch a Disney short, which is met
with uproarious laughter by all. Sturges frames laughing faces in close-up, relishing the
smiles and displays of joy with ethnographic acuity. Nevertheless, these moments are largely
a ruse on Sturges's part, since the entire film has been warning about outsiders gaining easy
access to troubled spaces and self-licensing an ability to authorize authenticity. If these
moments are meant to be endearing, Sturges has transgressed his own warnings.
To take Sullivan's Travels on its own “cockeyed caravan” terms is to fall victim to the very
cautions Sturges surmises throughout. The film's ending, with Sully and the Girl (Veronica
Lake) in smiling close-up, is something of a disappearing act, as the complexities of Sturges's
comprehensive interests are boiled down into a simplistic one-liner by Sully, who's adamant
that he's doing the indigent a favor by making comedies for them to lap up. In effect, Sully has
shed one dogmatic persona for another, now understanding his plight as one of pacification,
not enlightenment. Either aim is problematic, since both trade sincerity and conviction for a
rote conception of what “the world needs.” Sturges advocates, in perhaps the most stoically
satirical ending in all of American cinema, that hubris supplants humanism when an artist
overdetermines a singular answer to healing. Such a mindset, by extension, could lead to
fascism, exclusion, and class-based oppression. Finally, in a wonderful irony, Hollywood's
first writer-director—that envied position of complete creative control—was perhaps its
biggest proponent of collective consciousness.
Clayton Dillard Slant
Hollywood’s self-exams are usually dipped in acid: What Price Hollywood?, A Star is
Born, Sunset Boulevard, The Bad and the Beautiful, The Big Knife, Two Weeks in
Another Town, The Day of the Locust. Even The Player, for all its pointed humor, has
murder on its mind. Preston Sturges’s well-regarded Sullivan’s Travels, freshly restored in a characteristically pristine Criterion package, is something else. Sturges
was no misanthrope. Unlike other Hollywood analyzers, he took glee in human
misbehavior. Sullivan’s Travels is delighted by eccentricities and is most often sweetnatured and funny. John L. Sullivan, a well-intended big time director played with
straightforward honesty by Joel McCrea, wishes to make a movie of poverty in
America called O Brother, Where Art Thou? But he has never wanted for anything,
so he dons a hobo outfit from the costume department and hits the rails. The suits are
outraged, until they see it as a fantastic publicity stunt. Sullivan manages to ditch them,
and then doubles his luck by meeting luscious Veronica Lake. From there, Sullivan’s
Travels veers in the most unexpected directions, and our poor naive director can’t
imagine the horrors awaiting.
Sullivan’s Travels is not Sturges’s best movie. It lacks the commanding high spirits of The Lady
Eve and The Palm Beach Story. But there is plenty to recommend, including the justly famous
comic chase scene to end all comic chase scenes. Lake is fetching, and she clearly enjoys piling
her platinum tresses in a cap to play a vagabond. McCrea is geologically
handsome, but he suggests a vulnerable little boy behind the solid
exterior. There is also the trademark sharp dialogue, fast action and
those grand supporting players. One of the pleasures of a Sturges
movie is the parade of oddballs, cranks, natty butlers, crass opportunists, lonely widows, and assorted miscreants that weave in and out of
nearly every scene, threatening to render the romantic leads irrelevant.
Perhaps more than any other Sturges movie, Sullivan’s Travels commits
itself to extreme changes in mood and tone. The chase scene, and
Lake’s sped-up sprint through a backlot in hoop skirt and bloomers, are
pure slapstick. At the other extreme is a chain-gang sequence of
shocking realism for 1941 Hollywood. When McCrea and Lake wander
through a hobo camp, the tone shifts again into something close to
what Sullivan envisioned for O Brother, Where Art Thou? These are
bold moves for writer-director Sturges, but not altogether successful.
Perhaps on numerous viewings the lurching back and forth would be
accepted, but Sullivan’s testimony suggesting that laughter is a higher calling than social realism
sticks in the craw. It’s one thing to celebrate laughter, and to ponder the responsibilities of the
moviemaker, but Sturges puts us through a fairly hellish middle portion of the movie, with
McCrea going so far as to pound a rock into someone’s head. With all that behind us, did
Sturges think we could shrug it off and conclude that laughter really is the best medicine? Or is
this his absolution from making “serious” pictures? Sturges’s methods and message leave me
with a vague unease.
Matthew Kennedy Bright Lights
and for our next presentation…