SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS (1941)

Neha says

Writer/director Preston Sturges was truly the master of dialogue comedies and Sullivan’s Travels is yet another case in point. Refined writing with clever one-liners as memorable as the movie; with dramatic irony that wonderfully carries characters and themes forward; with biting Hollywood satire and depression era commentary that creates a unique language of communication for the film and Sturges own uncanny, intuitive strength of using the rights words to communicate a thought, emotion, mood or motivation penetrates straight out of the tube and hits you where it matters most. Never missing a beat to mock his hero, maybe even an alter ego of Sturges himself, Hollywood movie writer/director Sullivan (Joel McCrea) decides to venture away from light hearted movie making to make serious cinema in the form of a script titled “O Brother, Where Art Thou” (Yes the Coen Brothers movie title got its inspiration right here!!!) Sullivan sets off for a tramp adventure, hoping real world troubles would give him that first hand knowledge to enrich his cinema. I like how Sturges adopts and abandons genre conventions at will. Never really fitting in the box of a true blue comedy, Sturges brings romance, drama, tragedy, road movie and prison film dynamics into play that feed off each other with aplomb while making the graph of his story dramatically unpredictable and intriguing. Yet he has a conventional regard for characters and set-up and understands the piercing impact of tone-spending the first half to amuse and tickle our senses with a romance sub-plot that has more fireworks between its leads, a charming McCrea and a luminous Victoria Lake in their first meeting alone than most movies can accomplish between its stars during an entire running time. Sullivan’s desperate antics to find “trouble”, his attempts at hoodwinking the hired brigade keeping tabs on him or his slice of slum life with Lake that plays out like a silent era movie handsomely complements the director’s screwball comic overtones. But then in the second half Sturges unexpectedly tightens the screws, adopts a darker, more sinister and realistic tone as Sullivan finds himself smack-bang and alone at the centre of inhumane, inescapable trouble that leads up to a climax that beautifully makes a statement for both the canvas of cinema and life, The message of the film, like Sullivan’s realizations, is both poignant and unassuming as it tells us with an entertaining and crisp 90 minutes how movies are remedies and the only source of pure escapism for the tragedies and stresses of life. One wordless moment that sums it all up with a pinching honesty has Sullivan along with other inmates at a chapel, laughing out loud in gay abandon at the innocuous, brainlessness of a cartoon, Well-acted, superbly written and skillfully directed-Preston Sturges puts his money where his mouth is with a film that echoes his belief- “Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.”

Ira says

Right, so it isn’t as dense as and hasn’t the scope and depth of self-discovery that Jonathan Swift’s classic (a requisite feature for anyone who’s ever studies English Literature beyond high school) Gulliver’s Travels has, and perhaps just as well, because this one more than anything is a good old fashioned feel good film. Preston Sturges’ satire, Sullivan’s Travels, a story about a director named Sullivan (Joel McCrea) who wants to make socially relevant cinema but finds out comedies maybe arts finest purpose after all, is a lovely film. We’ve seen movies about movies; movie making and showbiz in Hollywood for years and many of these have had satirical, political, social and romantic undertones. Some of these, in fact, we’ve looked at right here in the AFI project! (Remember YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, The Marx Brother’s A NIGHT AT THE OPERA and Chaplin’s, MODERN TIMES?) But Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels is an uncommon and memorable one thanks to some fine storytelling and a well etched, well written story.

The film opens with a dedication to comediennes the world over and slips effortlessly into a quickly edited, well-executed action sequence between two men atop a moving train. The cuts become faster, the shots closer till the men fall off in a frantic tussle and the screen says “The End”. The above happens on a projector screen and illustrate Sullivan’s latest efforts at movie making; a shift away from lighter fare, a move to make meaningful cinema about the common mans crisis that he tries desperately to sell to his colleagues and employers. No luck. According to them, Sullivan, who went to private boarding schools and college was not one to go around talking of human misery. And so determined, brilliant filmmaker Joe Sullivan sets out on a hilarious, poignant and life altering mission to find “trouble” and learn to experience what it is.

Intelligently directed with a confident, strong hand by Sturges with a delightful screenplay that blends irony, with just the right splashes of farce, humor, wit, romance and moments of real pathos and tragedy, this one tugs at your heart strings and still leaves you with an uplifting feeling that’s hard to resist or forget. Sturges avoids sentiment and sassiness, though the film has elements of both and characters with each, but things never get mushy, heavy handed or didactic. Instead we get clever wit and humor in abundance. McCrea’s understated, dry performance carries this one. He has an air of dignified charm and inherent goodness about him whether dressed in a suit, bathrobe, or tattered clothing, scrambling onto a moving train, caught with chains on his feet or falling into a swimming pool. I loved the chemistry and relationship between the vibrant Lake & McCrea, the montage of the two as homeless wanderers, the significance and symbolism of feet in the film, and a wonderful moment of surprise when a man who steals money from Sullivan, driven by greed and poverty meets an unexpected, tragic fate. As Sullivan wanders, loses and later finds his way, the film takes on a slightly graver tone, but Sturges balances the serio-comic with ease and doesn’t lose control of his storytelling. The dark and light, the high and low, the rich and poor, black and white, love and divorce, life and death and all those wonderful opposing pairs of contradictions in the narrative that really reflect the very fabric of human existence find a eureka moment in a scene in a church where criminals in chains, men of god, common folk, men, women, strangers and children find something common to laugh at; Disney’s MICKEY MOUSE. “There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that’s all people have? It isn’t much but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan”. Amen sir, to that.