Preston Sturges (1941)
A brilliant comedy – a satire of Hollywood but an expression too of the genius of the place: the tone is never superior or cold-hearted. John L Sullivan (Joel McCrea), a successful director of comedy movies, feels morally and artistically compelled to make a picture about social deprivation during the Great Depression. He’s determined to go on the road, as a hobo, to experience the reality of a hand to mouth existence. At first, he keeps failing to get away from Hollywood at all. His studio boss and a busload of ‘guardians’ insist on following him; Sullivan hitches a lift and arrives back where he started. Eventually, though, Hollywood loses track of him and Sullivan is presumed dead (murdered). In fact, he’s got himself sentenced to six years’ hard labour and is working on a chain gang. He eventually extricates himself by confessing to the killing of John L Sullivan, which gets his photograph onto newspaper front pages and seen in Hollywood. Sullivan discovers in the course of his odyssey that comedy is the best bet after all: it makes people laugh, however unhappy their circumstances may be. He sees the light when he and his fellow prisoners are watching a Disney cartoon as the guests of a black church congregation. Sullivan no longer wants to adapt for the screen a socially conscientious novel called ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ Instead, he’ll carry on making popular hits like ‘Ants in Your Plants of 1939’. (These names as perfect. So, in a more obvious way, is the name of the worthy novel’s author, Sinclair Beckstein.)
As Peter Swaab, the curator of BFI’s ‘Screwball!’ season, noted in his excellent introduction to the screening, Sullivan’s Travels seems to be reflecting on the screwball comedies of recent years as much as exemplifying the genre. (Preston Sturges is reflecting too, of course, on films like John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, released in the previous year.) Sullivan’s Travels moves rapidly but not to a screwball beat. The mood changes are extreme and their unsettling effect makes the movie more powerful. That last sentence doesn’t do anything like justice to how funny the film is, though. The contest between artistic ambition and commercial (and human) reality is a good comic premise but Sturges’s dialogue (abundant and so easy that it feels modern) and the cast turn the picture into something rarer: a comedy that you laugh at and admire at the same time. This is the first Sturges film that I’ve seen (it was really disappointing that I had a migraine and had to cry off The Lady Eve the following evening) so I’m not familiar with his stock company of character actors, except those who, like Eric Blore, I know from other people’s movies. Blore (as Sullivan’s valet), Robert Greig (his butler), William Demarest and Franklin Pangborn (two of the Hollywood contingent) are especially enjoyable.
Veronica Lake is a real surprise as ‘The Girl’ (she never gets a name) – an unsuccessful actress whom Sullivan first meets in a diner when he’s hitched his way back to Hollywood. Because of the types of role that Lake went on to play, I’d no idea she had such comic flair: her highly stylised line readings are so assured they become completely natural. She’s quite affecting too once The Girl and Sullivan fall in love. But it’s Joel McCrea who holds everything together. I must have seen him before but I can’t honestly remember doing so. That means that he also is a revelation. He made plenty of Westerns early and later on in his career but he was at his peak, in terms of the range of roles he was getting, in the early 1940s. He’s perfectly cast here – both as a likeable, rather shallow idealist and in physical terms. McCrea’s rangy, loose-limbed quality makes him a flexible hero in more ways than one: he’s unthreatening but also convincing as someone who can withstand the physical indignities and ordeals that Sullivan has to endure, which are many. Although he exudes radiant good health, McCrea, when Sullivan catches a cold, produces the best high-volume sneezing I think I’ve ever heard in a movie.
Pauline Kael and Manny Farber, both big fans of Preston Sturges, evidently thought Sullivan’s Travels one of his weaker films yet it’s become over the years perhaps his most famous. There are no bad jokes in the film but there is one in its afterlife: the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Are Thou? (2000) The brothers’ bizarre fusion of nostalgia and sneering is the antithesis of Sullivan’s Travels (as Sturges’s pastiche sequences of various types of film in the course of the movie demonstrate). The Coens’ belief (according to Wikipedia) that O Brother is ‘almost what Sullivan would have ended up making after Sullivan’s Travels ends’ is breathtaking.
21 January 2013
