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Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake go on a journey of discovery - with a lot of jokes |
Director: Preston Sturges
Cast: Joel McCrea (John L. Sullivan), Veronica Lake (The
Girl), Robert Warwick (Mr Lebrand), William Demarest (Mr Jonas), Franklin
Pangborn (Mr Casalsis), Porter Hall (Mr Hadrian), Byron Foulger (Mr Johnny
Valdelle), Robert Grieg (Burrows), Eric Blore (Sullivan’s Valet)
Burrows [his butler]: If you’ll permit me to say so sir, the subject is not an interesting one. The poor know all about poverty and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamourous.
Preston Sturges was one of Hollywood’s first writer-directors,
a whip-sharp satirist. In Sullivan’s
Travels he turned his guns firmly on Hollywood, satirising the industries self-importance.
However, what he did so well was to counterbalance this with a genuinely insightful
look at the urban poor and a celebration of the magic of the movies. The fact
that he managed to cover this all in one movie – without making the film feel
wildly inconsistent in tone – is quite some accomplishment.
John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) is a Hollywood director tired
of making shallow crowd-pleasers. He wants to make a serious, social-issue film
(called O Brother Where Art Thou?). When
studio heads point out he knows nothing about the working man, Sullivan
declares he will head to live the life of a drifter until he understands them.
After several false starts, it isn’t until he meets a girl (Veronica Lake) that
he starts to truly experience the life of the poor.
I’ve mentioned Sullivan’s
Travels shifts in tone. In many ways, it’s a film that wants to have its
cake and eat it – to be a satire of self-important move-making, and at the same
time be an important movie. The extent to which it succeeds is a matter of
taste: I can imagine plenty of people being thrown by the sudden shift in tone
that kicks in for the final 40 minutes, after the slapstick and screwball
comedy of the opening hour. But that’s partly the point. Sullivan’s Travels works because it puts all the objections you
could make to a film “teaching” real people about their lives in that first
hour – so you feel disarmed heading into the final half hour when the film does
just this.
So that first hour first: it’s very funny. The scattergun
satire of Hollywood folks is brilliantly done. The fast-paced dialogue of
Sullivan and his studio bosses discussing his plans is wonderfully funny – how
could you not like an exchange like this:
Studio head #1: But with a little sex in it,
Sullivan: A little but I don’t want to stress it.
What’s sparkling about the exchanges is that Sullivan is
just as out-of-touch and elitist as the suits, but with a higher degree of
self-delusion. His attempts to head off onto the open road and live the life of
the drifter are hilariously inept – his first sees him travelling with a
“support team” (including a doctor, chef and media man); the second sees him
accidentally return back to Hollywood. Sullivan wants to make a film about real
people, but Sturges stresses he is as clueless and confused about the subject
as any other rich Hollywood snob. The film has a glorious mixture of verbal
acrobatics and slapstick pratfalls to demonstrate the comedy of this
extraordinarily rich man (who at one point off-handedly runs through the
features of his vast home) trying to relate at a distance to the poor.
It takes his meeting with Veronica Lake’s unnamed Girl for
him to begin to understand the drifter’s life. Lake’s character remains
unnamed, which is another joke on Hollywood – earlier Sullivan discusses women
in films with the phrase “There’s always a girl in the picture”, so the plot
shoe-horning a Girl in (without even naming her) as a sort of beggar Viola is,
in itself, a neat parody of the structural conventions of Hollywood films.
Anyway, it’s the introduction of this character that serves as Sullivan’s
gateway into seeing what the world is like. Disguised as a boy (which allows
plenty of neat gags in itself) the Girl takes Sullivan on a tour of shanty-towns
and soup kitchens.
It’s here the tone of the film slowly shifts towards
seriousness as we finally get to see the lives of paupers, in a film satirising
a Hollywood director who wants to make a film about that subject. It’s
wonderfully meta! Sturges shoots these scenes with tenderness and simplicity, without
dialogue and scored only by gentle music. There are some small laughs on the
way – but we never laugh at the poor and the overall impression is of the quiet
dignity of these people just struggling to get by. It couldn’t seem further
away from Sullivan’s privileged expectations. It’s quiet and it’s dignified.
Sullivan ends the film (for various reasons) as part of a
chain-gang, and finally true suffering and gains the strength of character to
acknowledge his own vanity. In one of the film’s most magical sequences,
Sullivan watches a film with his fellow convicts and a poor black congregation.
Unlike a sequence earlier where he watched a film with the urban middle class (hilariously
then every possible breach of cinema etiquette is made, from crunching loud
food to babies wailing) this audience are transported by the magic of a Walt
Disney cartoon.
This sequence is justly famous, not only for its innocent
charm, but also its ahead-of-its-time treatment of the black congregation. The
congregation is open-hearted, intelligent and generous. There is a marvellous
(and moving) rendition of Go Down Moses
and the black working class is contrasted with the dehumanising conditions of
the chain gang. The whole sequence points out the underlying social injustice
of America during this era. It’s wonderful – so well done you forget the film
(in its jauntier first half) had a crude “white face” gag with its forelock-tugging
black chef.
That’s the kind of film this is – a real mixture of genres,
of views, of satire on social commentary mixed with real social commentary…
Sturges throws almost everything at the wall here, and nearly all of it sticks.
The underlying theme, if there is one, is the nature of class and privilege in
America. Sullivan is well-off, from a rich background. He finds himself on a
chain-gang when he is mistaken for the bums he is attempting to find out more
about – but when he is revealed as a rich film director he is immediately
released, despite still being guilty of the offence he was arrested for in the
first place. In America, money talks and everyone else walks.
Sullivan’s Travels
is probably not going to be everyone’s taste. Watching it, I missed the comedy
of the first half during the more serious second half, cleverly done as the
build of expectations was (how can you criticise the film, when the film is
already criticising itself successfully?). Sure parts of it are dated, but it
contains so many different types of film-making (screwball wit, Chaplin-esque
pratfalls, animation, social realism, melodrama, romantic comedy) it’s almost a
film school essay. It also manages to make its changes of tone throughout feel
like natural developments.
All this and I’ve hardly mentioned the performances. The
cast is full of brilliant character players, all of whom get their moments to
shine – Sturges cast from a pool of regular actors, and he was a superb judge
of distinctive faces and unique vocal delivery. Veronica Lake is very good –
endearing but also sharp and smart as the Girl – but the film is totally
anchored by Joel McCrea’s superb, low-key, straight-forward performance which
resists all temptations to wink at the camera.
Sullivan’s Travels
feels like a little known masterpiece – but it deserves being known better.
It’s original, it’s funny, it’s moving, it’s clever and it’s packed full of
great moments. It’s a wonderful example of old-school Hollywood looking harshly
at itself – not only at its shallowness and formulaic nature, but also at its
self-importance and self-satisfaction – but still acknowledging that the
escapist pleasure it can give to people is
valuable, that it can be a force for good, for all its faults. It tries to have
its cake and eat it – but do you know what? It’s probably one of the very few
films that pulls that off.
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