SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS A
USA (90 mi) 1941
d: Preston Sturges
To the memory of those
who made us laugh: to the motley mountebacks, the clowns, the buffoons, in all
times and in all nations, whose efforts have lightened our burden a little,
this picture is affectionately dedicated.
Preston Sturges began his career as a playwright, earning
more than a quarter of a million dollars by his second Broadway play, Strictly Dishonorable, a staggering
figure at the outset of the Depression in the late 1920’s, eventually becoming
a movie screenwriter in the 1930’s, becoming disenchanted with the way
Hollywood directors were handling his dialogue, so he traded in his salary
rights for the screenplay of THE GREAT MCGINTY (1940) for the chance to direct
the film, something that set a precedent for later writer/directors like Billy
Wilder and John Huston, not only to direct their own material, but to assemble their
own unofficial stock company. With
Paramount promoting the film, it was a modest financial success, with Sturges
winning an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, his first of three
nominations in the category, also including two films from 1944, HAIL THE
CONQUERING HERO and THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN’S CREEK. Though he had a thirty-year career in
Hollywood, Sturges’ most prolific output came between 1940 to 1944, writing 7
comedies, four of which were chosen by the American Film Institute (AFI) among
their 100 funniest American films, after
which his career (still in his mid-40’s) over the next 15 years sputtered,
eventually dying bankrupt and forgotten while writing his memoirs in New York’s
Algonquin Hotel, a haven for literary figures, very similar, oddly enough, to
the fizzled career of actress Veronica Lake in the 50’s, who was arrested later
in life for public drunkenness, drifting from various cheap hotels until she
eventually died of alcoholism.
Released just a few weeks after the invasion of Pearl
Harbor, the timing of SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS feels unfortunate, as a comic film satirizing
the tastelessness and pretentious nature of the movie industry feels secondary
to a nation at war, as it questions the reality as presented by Hollywood films
at a time when the nation itself was immersed in a devastatingly ugly reality
of its own, the American entrance into World War II. Making matters worse, the film was advertised
as a Veronica Lake movie following her rapid rise to fame from I WANTED WINGS
(1941), the first film to showcase the actress as a platinum blond, yet she is
more of a sidekick in a film that was written for lead actor Joel McCrea as a
kind of everyman. The result is a film
that was unsuccessful at the box office, one of the bleakest and most
disturbing comedies to ever come out of Hollywood, but whose reputation has
only grown over time. The film is
surprisingly complex with two distinctly different halves, with inexplicably
surreal moments, evolving through a series of Odysseus-like misadventures, turning
into a meandering heroic journey of self-discovery, overcoming plenty of
obstacles along the way. A parody of
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels,
but instead of moving from a cheery optimist to a human misanthrope, this film
instead doubts its own relevancy at the outset and slowly discovers its reason
for being along the way. Opening with a
film within a film, McCrea as Sullivan is a Hollywood director who’s had a
string of lightweight, comedic hits, but now wants to direct something more
serious, choosing to explore the destitute world of tramps during the
Depression living on the road, hopping boxcars, and living in hobo camps from
the novel O Brother, Where Art Thou? (a
title later claimed by the Coen Brothers in their tribute to this film in
2000). While the studio heads hate the
idea, claiming it’s too depressing, Sullivan insists upon going on the road and
discovering firsthand what it’s like to be poor.
The absurdity of seeing a Hollywood movie mogul, a college
graduate educated in prep schools dressing as a penniless hobo and hitting the
road, is patently ridiculous, especially with a motor home of his handlers
following close behind. Thus the journey
begins with the most exaggerated, broadly based and stereotypical
characterizations, which includes the frenetic pace of screwball comedy and a
chase scene right out of the Keystone Cops, where some may take offense by the
derogatory racial caricature of a black chef, credited as the “colored cook,”
but all the characters revert to the outlandish mannerisms of Silent era films,
where Sullivan himself is a throwback to Chaplin’s Little Tramp and his
association with poverty, especially when he enters the domain of the
downtrodden. Soon enough, after some
unpleasantries performing community service in the home of a sex-starved widow,
Sullivan finds himself right back in Hollywood, now a hobo entering a cheap
diner for a cup of coffee, where an attractive young actress wannabe known only
as the Girl (Veronica Lake) buys him a meal.
Their dialogue together is reminiscent of Lake as a femme fatale in film
noir, as she’s got a tough edge to her delivery, but their chemistry together
is instantly appealing, especially the way she always seems to smile at his awkwardness
and utter male futility, feeling somewhat betrayed when he turns out to be one
of those same successful Hollywood directors that have been turning her down
for months. One of the priceless scenes
is seeing Sullivan dressed as a tramp walking around his million dollar Beverly Hills mansion
showing off his tennis courts and his pool.
Insistent upon carrying out his harebrained scheme, she insists upon
going along with him, both dressed as tramps, where she’s dressed as a young
boy, where they hop traincars and interestingly sleep together in boxcars and hobo
camps.
In what is easily the scene of the film, precisely the film
Sullivan wanted to make, Sturges films their entry into the actual world of
tramps as a wordless montage, a seven-minute sequence panning through all the
various down-and-out characters of a shantytown, where by now they’re literally
no different, wearing sandwich board signs for cash or passing out leaflets, forced
to endure the endless church sermons for a free meal and having to sleep
cramped on the floor in hobo shelters, where his shoes are stolen while he
slept. In a romantically tender scene
that defies belief, the two are alone strolling along a moonlit lake, seemingly
in perfect harmony with nature and each other, yet they walk right past a man
literally hanging from a tree, where his feet can be seen dangling from the
branches, but neither one looks or comments upon it, and there is no reference
to it whatsoever in the film. The
reference to evil is like something out of The
Night of the Hunter (1955), only seen from an adult’s perspective. It’s here that a darker realism clearly
replaces the lightweight, artificial tone expressed earlier in the film. In fact, Sullivan accidentally ends up in his
own nightmare, like one of his concocted movie adventures, only this time it’s
real and there is no escape. After being
hit on the head and left for dead, he ends up charged with a crime he can’t
remember (from temporary amnesia) and sentenced to a chain gang, entering a
hallucinatory world where he’s quickly woken up by his grotesque mistreatment,
denied all privileges like writing or making a phone call, literally becoming a
caged animal, caught in a bleaker existence than Hitchcock’s equally downbeat The
Wrong Man (1956).
This prolonged sequence of brutality prevented the film from
being exported overseas during wartime, so the enemy could not use it for
propaganda purposes. But this evolves
into an utterly enthralling sequence in a black Pentecostal church, where the
pastor (Jess Lee Brooks) vociferously asks his congregation “by word or deed”
not to make the all-white chain gang prisoners feel unwelcome, singing “Let My
People Go” Go Down Moses -
Sullivan's Travels (1941) - YouTube (3:31) as they are led into the front
rows to watch a movie together with the parishioners. The race reversal and depth of sorrow of chants
from typical black chain gangs does not go unnoticed in this weird twist of
fate, where unlike the exaggerated caricature of the black chef early in the
film, here blacks are portrayed with utmost dignity and sincerity, becoming the
most humane people in the film. It was
Sturges intention to play a Chaplin film, but rights were denied, playing a
Disney Mickey Mouse cartoon featuring Playful
Pluto (1934), where Pluto’s paws continually get caught on fly paper, where
the animated pranks and pratfalls leave the congregation in stitches, a welcome
relief from the otherwise harsh human conditions. Overall this is a clever and extremely witty
film, becoming a populist treatise on humor, where the concise film construction
itself is continually unpredictable, becoming a film for the ages. While the film is on a short list of one of
the funniest films ever, particularly at the time of its release, it’s perhaps best
remembered today for its serious elements, where what’s ostensibly a comedic
film brilliantly accentuates the plight of the poor while at the same time
highlighting the clueless nature of an affluent class that remains indifferent
to their lives, pointing out in an autobiographical context the hypocrisy of a
multi-million dollar industry making films about subjects it clearly fails to
understand. The film is stunning in its
refreshingly honest insight.
