SULLIVANS TRAVELS: or, How Pluto Escaped the Flypaper.
Written: Aug 04 '00 (Updated Feb 18 '06)
Product Rating:
Pros: A hilarious, affectionate essay on patronizing while helping "the little people."
Cons: Many episodes and styles that may confuse viewer and critic alike as to its purpose.
The Bottom Line: SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS: a more relevant film today than when it was made. Sixty years after the Depression, we are more unctuous, more oblivious to how the other 40 percent live.
Between the "Compassionate Conservatism" of George Bush now and the Coen Brothers' crazy O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? the message of Preston Sturges' SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS (1942) remains: Most of us are at the end of our day pretty much where we started. If we are truly rich, we stay rich; if we are poor, we stay poor. It takes a nightmare or a miracle to shift the equation. SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS provides a satirical fantasy-nightmare, showing us both extremes, and illustrates the point that wherever we are on the scale, we may as well trust in divine laughter because in the end that's all we've got.
SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS is also an allegory about the struggle Producer/Writer/Director Sturges was having with Paramount Executive Producer Buddy DeSylva et al over his wish to make an Important Film about the invention of anesthetics.
John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrae), who can lick any schlock comedy director in the World of Hollywood, dreams of making socially conscious Motion Pictures. He has a string of hits to his credit, and an unhappy wife. He is miserable. He wants a new start.
The opening credits show us the title SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS, as if it were the kind of classic that Irving Thalberg (THE BARRETTS OF WIMPOLE STREET, 1936) or David Selznick (DAVID COPPERFIELD, 1935) might favor. The pages of the credits are opened by exquisite hands, and we see Sullivan and The Girl (Veronica Lake), dressed like Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard in MODERN TIMES (1936), bestriding scenes of "the little people."
Cut!
We are in a subjective camera scene atop a swaying freight train. Two figures, a Capitalist and a Communist, are struggling on the roof of a boxcar to the death. As they fall off the boxcar into a frothing river, "The End" appears, with appropriate important music, and we realize we are in a projection room reminiscent of the Newsreel Sequence from CITIZEN KANE (Welles, 1941). This is the kind of movie John L. Sullivan longs to make. America is just emerging from the Great Depression into the jaws of World War II.
The Studio Heads, Lebrand and Hadrian (Robert Warwick and Porter Hall) are not buying. Films like the one they've just seen "gives [them] the creeps." They know such films seldom make even a small profit. But Sullivan is the Genius who gave several boffo comedy hits to them and to the World: SO LONG SARONG, ANTS IN YOUR PLANTS OF 1939 and HEY HEY IN THE HAYLOFT. They have to humor Sullivan, and so they keep trying to support his dream project, O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? if he will do it "with a little sex," or turn it into a musical.
Lebrand and Hadrian point out to Sullivan that his films have always been "about nice clean young people who fell in love, with laughter and music and legs." Sullivan comes from a well-off middle class family, has been well-educated, lives a life of Hollywood luxury, they say. (Much like Preston Sturgis.) Does he really know anything about poverty?
Sullivan admits he doesn't, but appalls them with a resolve, like a modern politician, to go among the poor and hungry, to learn what it is really like to be wretched. He will dress up as a tramp, travel with only a dime in his pocket, and no one will be allowed to drive him!
Everyone, even his butler (Robert Grieg) and valet (Eric Blore), dissuade him as much as they can, but off he goes. The Moguls send after him his loyal entourage, in a "lovely land-yacht that DeMille used in NORTHWEST MOUNTED [1940]," with Public Relations Specialists Mr Casalais (Franklin Pangborn) and Mr Jones (William Demarest) issuing press releases at every stop. Sullivan escapes them in a Keystone Kop sequence similar to one in W. C. Fields' THE BANK DICK (1940), but he is caught, brought back to Hollywood. He makes a deal with the Studio that if they will leave him alone, he will meet them at an obscure railway crossroads called Las Vegas.
Sullivan's Second Travel, however, ends like the first, when he eludes a couple of love-starved spinsters who take him in, and a truck driver drives him the wrong way back to Hollywood. There, in an all-night diner, he meets The Girl (Veronica Lake), a discouraged starlet/extra ready to go back home. He takes pity on her, and because she is very pretty, he offers to drive her to Chicago. He finally convinces her he really is a movie director, picks up his car, and goes on the road with her. It has not occurred to Sullivan that his servants, finding the car missing, will report it stolen, and before long, Sullivan is arrested for stealing his own car.
When he straightens the matter out, back in Hollywood, he entices The Girl to hop a freight with him on yet another Travel. By accident, after a cold, smelly night in a hog car, they jump off in a switching yard. When the local diner attendant (Roscoe Ates) stands this miserable, broke pair some donuts and coffee, it supports Sullivan's belief in the goodness of "little people." (A la THE GRAPES OF WRATH, Ford, 1940.)
Looking out the window of the diner at the tracks and the desert stretching, without a house, into the distance, Sullivan asks, "What town is this?"
It is Las Vegas (in perhaps Sturges' greatest act of prescience).
The land-yacht is waiting nearby, and the grateful director brings back to the man hundreds of dollars as a reward.
From that point, the film moves from comedy, melodrama and satire, to comic nightmare, as Sullivan moves closer to what he says he wants: The Experience of Being Down and Out.
The Studio is getting good copy from "his stunt" and agrees to meet him and The Girl next in Kansas City, where Sullivan expects to have the raw experience from which to reshape O BROTHER, WHERE OUT THOU? But he doesn't anticipate that, after leaving The Girl in safety, his final travel will cause him to lose his memory when attacked by a man who has stolen his shoes. Sullivan hits a railroad bull and, as a harsh result of a kind known to the anonymous poor, he is sentenced to six years on a Southern chain gang (as in I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG, Leroy, 1932).
He eventually has to confess to his own murder in order to be released.
Along the way, from a series of experiences, culminating in a Pentecostal Service in a Black Church, Sullivan learns that when people have nothing, laughter is the great anodyne. He sits with his chain gang companions in Church as the Preacher (Arthur Hoyt) shows them on a sheet, with organ accompaniment, Disney's (last) black and white cartoon -- "Playful Pluto" -- in which Pluto, caught in flypaper, becomes more and more entangled as he ties himself in knots to extricate himself. The prisoners can't get enough because it is Pluto (and not themselves, for a moment) who is trapped.
SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS produces the happy ending that Moguls Lebrand and Hadrian would cheer. Sullivan has the commercial project they want, he has The Girl, and estranged wife (Jan Buckingham), thinking him dead, has married his business manager.
Preston Sturges presents his film in a variety of styles and moods. His stock company is at their best. Veronica Lake, a perfect foil for the always competent McCrae, in a funny reprise of a character she played in THIS GUN FOR HIRE (Tuttle, 1942), proves entrancing.
It would be a mistake, as some have written though, to think that John LLoyd Sullivan was really Preston Sturges, and that Sturges gave up his serious purpose. On the contrary, he would redouble his efforts to make a "serious motion picture." The film he wanted to make, finally entitled THE GREAT MOMENT, in its finished form at least, turned out to be as meretricious as the earnest promises of a George Bush or an Al Gore. It had no more validity for ordinary Americans than the average "important vision" of today.
Producer/Writer/Director Sturges never gave up his dream in real life. Although his first son was born while he was directing "the swamp scene" in SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS, 50 miles from Hollywood, he soon separated from his wife Louise. (For the rest of his life he pursued "The Girl," in many versions.) He spent the next two years, off and on, making THE GREAT MOMENT (1943), again with Joel McCrae, about Dr William T. Morton, a dentist who invented one of the first devices for administering ether to eliminate the horrendous pain of surgical operations. A pleasant enough and very compasionate biopic, audiences saw it as almost as bad as a trip to the dentist.
Cut and recut by Paramount, the source of Sturges' leaving the studio which had nurtured him, THE GREAT MOMENT (his O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?) was a great financial failure, and it marked the beginning of his decline.
A comedy director, disgusted with Hollywood s trivialities, disguises himself as a bum and sets off to discover what America needs. This masterpiece b...More at Buy.com
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