USA
2.5*
Director:
Preston Sturges
Screenwriter:
Preston Sturges
Director of Photography:
John Seitz
Running time: 90 minutes
This is my first Sturges film, and I like the Capra quality of the thing. There is something very warm and fuzzy about the story, even though it deals, albeit obliquely, with the idea of poverty. I also like films that deal with the film industry, and Sullivan’s Travels is a comedy about the commercial infeasibility of making films that deal with socially relevant topics rather than straightforward comedies, which almost inevitably do better at the box office. However, whereas Capra had a comedic way of presenting dramatic and important messages (Mr Smith Goes to Washington: “Stand up for what is right!”; It’s a Wonderful Life: “Don’t ever think that you haven’t made a difference!”; It Happened One Night: “Down with the walls of Jericho! We are in love!”), this film by Preston Sturges doesn’t quite rise above its comedic simplicity.
The film was made at the beginning of the Second World War and was released at the end of 1941, around the time of the Pearl Harbor attack that escalated the American military’s participation. Social issues, such as unemployment and low income, are raised in the film (this was at a time when U.S. unemployment figures, of a population still rattled by the Great Depression of the 1930s, were around 15%), but the central character regards everything from a comfortable distance. Sure, he mingles with the hoi polloi and even shares a table with them, but there is very little – if not a complete lack of – interaction between him and those he wants to represent on the big screen.
In fact, one can easily forget that Sullivan is actually a director. He doesn’t seem very awkward in his scenes with the homeless, and such moments of uneasiness as there are (at the communal dinner table, for example) have very little screen time and do not communicate much except a little comedy. Chaplin dealt comically with the life of a tramp, but even his films have emotions and insight into the life of someone who is homeless to a much deeper degree than anything in Sullivan’s Travels.
Sullivan’s Travels opens with a marvellous scene: Two men, accompanied by very loud, very enthusiastically bombastic music, are fighting on top of a train advancing at full speed through the dark night. This turns out to be the final scene of another film, screened for some producers. Such metatextuality is refreshing, considering the banal nature of most of the rest of the film.
The film contains at least one very bad scene. In prison, where there is a lot of hardship (although the only real hardship we ever see inflicted on anybody is on John Sullivan), the prisoners go to watch a movie one night: cartoons by Walt Disney. The moment the picture starts, the prisoners burst out laughing, to such a degree you might think they are having seizures. It is an absolutely ludicrous way to communicate the message (comedy works, even in hard times), and I found it thoroughly simpleminded.
Based on my experience of Sullivan’s Travels, a film that is supposed to be Preston Sturges’s masterpiece, it is very easy to come to the conclusion that he was no Frank Capra, and while there is some amusing banter between Joel McCree and Veronica Lake, in the spirit of screwball comedies, the film never seriously investigates the social milieu its main character wishes to study.