It looks like ridiculous fun for an actor be in a Preston Sturges film. Everyone gets a mouthful of snappy, colorful dialogue. Almost nobody feels like window-dressing. Even actors with small speaking roles get memorable moments. Sturges had an eye for great character-actors. He hired the same ones over and over (William Demarest, Porter Hall, Franklin Pangborn, just to name a few) and made actual use of their talents at holding their own against anyone on screen. Sturges could sketch out a full-blooded human being with a few lines. He could create a world.
Sturges was among the rare one-man-army writer/directors in Hollywood at the time and he earned it with skills like that and masterpieces like this.
Sullivan’s Travels is still blisteringly, ferociously meaningful today (and funny). I think it’s one of those films that everyone who cares about movies should see.
Sturges gets right to the point. The story: An A-list Hollywood comedy director, Sullivan, played by Joel McCrea, yearns to make something more “important”. He wants to make a social-message drama, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, about the plight of the poor and disadvantaged. Sullivan’s got big ideas, but the top guys at the studio don’t know what to make of it. While trying to dissuade him, they remind him that he’s a wealthy man from a plush background who’s never been under society’s boot heel for a day in his life. He won’t know what he’s talking about in a film like this. He’ll fall flat on this face. Bottom line: These guys can smell a bomb.
Meanwhile, this only encourages Sullivan further. He knows that the studio guys are right so he decides to conduct his own research. Sullivan ventures out into the world as a hobo, in ragged clothes and with only a dime in his pocket.
His initital attempts at this go off-the-rails, as the studio suits keep a close eye on their Golden Goose (following him slowly in a bus) and, even when he thinks he’s getting away, fate keeps sending him back to Hollywood. Sullivan has to go through a series of baby-steps on his way out of his opulent life and into the world of the penniless and desperate.
Each time, he gets closer and closer until he’s finally REALLY pulled down into the black hole via machinations that I’d rather not spoil except to say that Sturges tells it beautifully. And harshly. When this film gets serious, it’s dead serious. Downright bleak. The whole tone of the film changes in a way that feels as natural as breathing. (And it later changes back just as naturally.)
Sturges pulls off a monumental trick here. It’s no spoiler to say that when it comes to Sullivan’s internal struggle, Sturges takes the side of comedy. The slapstick moments throughout (a gag in which everyone falls into a swimming pool, a wacky high-speed chase) give that away. Sturges sees value in feather-light fluff. He’s here to stand up for escapism.
Before he can make that point though–and make it matter–he first needs to show that he understands drama. He needs to show us that he gets Sullivan’s ambition.
Sullivan is earnest. He’s not seeking awards or status. He’s having a 100% honest “What am I doing with my life?” moment. Sturges teases him here and there, but Sullivan’s crisis is no joke. The film runs with it. (A lesser film would depict Sullivan as a complete fool.)
Along the way, Sturges gives us the most harrowing depictions of life on the low side as seen in a Hollywood film since Depression-era, pre-Code Warner Brothers. He hired some of the hardest, meanest, saddest faces at Central Casting to populate his tour of the impoverished underbelly, which culminates in a darkly beautiful six-minute sequence with no dialogue or any ambient sound at all, only music and artful imagery.
With a master’s clean lines and economy and withIn the format of a comedy, complete with a sweet romance (with Veronica Lake, here a struggling wannabe-startlet about to give up and go back home, whom McCrea “meets cute”), Sturges sneakily makes all of the points that Sullivan might have made in his proposed dramatic opus. He gives us hopelessness. Injustice. A world of prey and undisguised predators. Respite in religion and whatever light entertainment that can carry you away.
And when Sullivan gets in deep legal shit while everyone thinks he’s a vagrant, it’s not lost on Sturges how all of those problems magically go away when he’s revealed as a wealthy man from Hollywood.
This is a wise film. It lets its main character take his strange path without serious indictment. Sturges doesn’t judge him for being rich and successful. He’s as human as anyone else in the film, even as he’s clueless and bumbling and working against the advice of every single person he knows, Sullivan is pure of heart as he engages in one of the most noble pursuits there is.
He’s learning.