Sullivan's Travels: An Appreciation
Preston Stuges’ 1941 Classic a Deft Mix of Comedy, Social Comment
Feb 1, 2009
Sullivan’s Travels is the story of John L. Sullivan, a Hollywood musical comedy director yearning to make a Serious Picture – O Brother, Where Art Thou – about poverty, class struggle and other social problems. (Yes, the Coen Brothers’ film of the same name is a wry homage to Sullivan’s Travels.) It doesn’t help that Sullivan is best known for movies like Ants in Your Plants of 1939 and Hey, Hey in the Hayloft.
Joel McCrea Stars as Hollywood Director
Handsome, articulate Joel McCrea is perfectly cast as the well-meaning, monied living room liberal eyeing a world still reeling from depression and a widening world war. For research, Sullivan first hits the studio's wardrobe department for a hobo disguise, then the road -- on foot, just a dime in his pocket.
When his bosses can’t talk him out of it, they send a cadre of studio personnel to shadow him, hilariously and ever so slowly, in a giant, luxury RV (i.e."land yacht").
Preston Sturges was at the midpoint of his career’s greatest professional output when he wrote and directed this very funny film which, like the eponymous character Sullivan, has lofty intentions.
Between 1940 and 1944, Sturges was in his glory days, with a remarkable output including The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero.
Preston Sturges’ Dialogue Fast and Furious
But among them, Sullivan’s Travels is the most serious-minded. The dramatic music over the opening credits cues us right away this is more than a pure Sturgian exercise in slapstick and wordplay.
Oh sure, the sparkling early dialogue here rolls off tongues astonishingly fast, which is part of the fun. But we know Big Themes will be played out when Sullivan tells his bosses, “I want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions. Start realism. The problems that confront the average man.”
To which actor Robert Warwick, as the studio chief, hilariously adds – and keeps adding throughout the scene – “…but with a little sex.”
Sexy Veronica Lake Co-Stars
Speaking of sex, it’s provided by a delightfully dry Veronica Lake, proving here she’s much more than a pretty foil for Alan Ladd. In silky dresses and peek-a-boo tresses, Lake steals whole scenes as a failed actress whose kindness to the “hobo” Sullivan eventually takes her into the movie world she couldn’t crack on her own.
In a classic cute-meet, Lake – also down on her luck and giving up her Hollywood dream – takes pity on Sullivan and buys him breakfast. But she’s no sentimentalist: “You know the nice thing about buying food for a man is that you don’t have to laugh at his jokes.”
She’s cynical, sarcastic – and very sexy, especially in a shower scene that’s amazingly suggestive for 1941.
Sturges’ Stock Company in Top Form
But Lake is the guest in this Stuges picture. The director’s regular stock company fill out the cast beautifully, including rotund Robert Greig as Sullivan’s wise butler, Franklin Pangborn as a fussy studio sycophant, a vintage William Demarest performance as a cranky studio functionary and Eric Blore – so good as a scheming valet in several Astaire/Rogers vehicles – basically reprising that role here.
What makes Sturges such a democratic director is that even minor players get major speeches. Consider Greig’s gutsy admonition to his boss, when Sullivan reveals his social experiment:
“The poor know all about poverty, and only the morbid rich find the subject glamorous. You see, sir, rich people and theorists, who are usually rich people, think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches – as disease might be called the lack of health. But it isn’t, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for the purpose of study. It is to be shunned.”
Comedy and Tragedy Mix
It’s true the movie careens from comedy to tragedy in the third act. Complaints about this mirror similar objections to James L. Brooks’ Terms of Endearment more than 40 years later. But these films show life can turn on a dime, and to deny this fact would doom filmmakers to only make pure comedies or dramas, when life is more complex, sudden and shaded than that.
“Sturges is more at home with slapstick irony (as in The Lady Eve, earlier in ’41),” noted Pauline Kael, “than in the mixed tones of this comedy-melodrama, but it’s a memorable film nonetheless.” (5001 Nights at the Movies, A Guide From A to Z,” Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1982.)
Anyway, by the end – when Sullivan has survived real horror – his epiphany reveals Sturges’ own: “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”
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