Sullivan’s Travels

Director: Preston Sturges

Screenplay: Preston Sturges

Stars: Joel McCrea (John L. Sullivan), Veronica Lake (The Girl), Robert Warwick (Mr. Lebrand), William Demarest (Mr. Jones), Franklin Pangborn (Mr. Casalsis), Porter Hall (Mr. Hadrian), Byron Foulger (Mr. Valdelle), Margaret Hayes (Secretary), Robert Greig (Sullivan’s Butler), Eric Blore (Sullivan’s Valet)

MPAA Rating: NR

Year of Release: 1941

Country: U.S.

Sullivan’s Travels Criterion Collection Blu-ray

Preston Sturges’s fourth directorial effort, Sullivan’s Travels, has often been described as “Swiftian,” and, indeed, its satire is as much akin to Jonathan Swift’s incisive sensibilities as its title is purposefully evocative of Swift’s satiric masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels. Sturges, who was the first Hollywood director to rise from the ranks of screenwriter, brought irony to the American cinema. He was widely regarded for both the socially conscious humor and sly subversion he brought to screwball and slapstick comedy and for the warmth he brought to his characters, from the main star down to each supporting role. Sturges was first and foremost a great writer, but he was also a highly competent director who, although never overtly flashy, was a gifted visual storyteller who made the most of his own witty dialogue.

Sullivan’s Travels takes place during the Great Depression and follows the adventures of a pretentious, yet sympathetic Hollywood director (often read as Sturges’s on-screen surrogate) named John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), who wants to stop making shallow comedies and direct a socially conscious masterpiece about human suffering. When two studio executives point out to him that he was a child of privilege who has never known a day of true suffering in his life, Sullivan lights upon the perfect idea: He will venture out into the world dressed as a hobo with only 10 cents in his pocket and learn what it is like to be poverty-stricken. (The scene in which he comes up with this idea after bickering with two studio executives is one of the best of Sturges’s entire output, as he captured the zings of the rapid-fire dialogue, sharp-barbed Hollywood satire, and comical conflict in a few perfectly choreographed long takes that would have made Orson Welles proud.) Sullivan’s intentions are noble in their own way, but that doesn’t stop Sturges from satirizing them by showing how a rich man donning hobo clothes and finding out what it’s like to be poor is fundamentally misguided.

Sullivan’s plan is not nearly as simple as he imagines, not because of the suffering it entails, but because he keeps failing in his attempts to be a hobo. For instance, when he first sets out, he hitches a ride on a truck in the middle of the night, and when he wakes up the next morning, he finds that he has been taken right back to the middle of Hollywood. His situation is further complicated by the large caravan of publicists and photographers sent by the publicity-hungry studio executives to follow him and document his journey. Along the way he meets up with a young woman (Veronica Lake)—she goes through the whole movie without ever being given a name—who is on her way out of town after a failed attempt at being an actress. Once she learns of Sullivan’s experiment, she decides to join him on his travels as his companion.

McCrea and Lake (who, believe it or not, was six months pregnant during the production) have immediate physical chemistry as soon as they share the screen together, even though this chemistry is purposefully muted by the plot and never fully realized. Yet, it is impossible to have a screen siren like Veronica Lake on-screen and not generate sexual heat, which she does quite often, even when (or, especially when) she is dirtied up and dressed down in hobo clothes. She makes a perfect counterpart to McCrea’s everyman director, and they have an excellent on-screen rapport, romantic and otherwise.

Formally, Sullivan’s Travels is not Sturges’s strongest work—it has a somewhat meandering quality to it that belies its minimal 90-minute running time—yet, it is a work of great depth and humanity that also happens to be very funny. It is a thoroughly mature work that doesn’t shy away from certain harsh social truths, although it is still able to posit an upbeat, hopeful message that doesn’t come off as naïve or syrupy. This tension existed in many of Sturges’s films, and it is the principle cause why many critics at the time, most notably James Agee, misread him.

While Sullivan’s Travels is a comedy, there are harrowing moments throughout that ensure us that Sturges does not take his subject matter lightly. When it comes to portraying poverty, Sturges doesn’t back down or cut corners; one of the movie’s most effective sequences is a silent seven minutes in which we simply follow McCrea and Lake as they move through the world of the homeless. There is nothing funny about being poor, as Sullivan’s butler plainly informs him near the beginning of the movie, and Sturges never pretends that there is. However, there is a great deal of humor in a wealthy movie director bumbling his way through trying to be poor, and Sturges makes it clear that Sullivan never really gets it until events conspire to assure him that he has no way out of his poverty. Only then does he truly understand the desolation of so many of his fellow human beings. What Sullivan ultimately learns is that it’s not the poverty itself that constitutes the suffering, but rather the inescapability of the poverty, the crushing of all hope.

The ultimate message of Sullivan’s Travels, spelled out a little too plainly in the final line, is the redemptive power of laughter. For a man who spent much of his career making comedies on both stage and screen, such a message seems obvious. Yet, for Sturges, there was something deeper and more profound that cut to the very essence of the cinema and its possibilities, especially in a time when the aesthetic and thematic severity of Italian neorealism was just around the corner.

Sturges emphasizes structurally and thematically that giving someone the opportunity to laugh—to relax, forget his worries, and simply enjoy humor—is more powerful than most would like to admit because it constitutes an escape, however temporary, from suffering. And Sullivan’s Travels does just that with its rapid-fire wordplay, outlandish slapstick sequences, and screwball situations. However, it also juxtaposes the comedy with strong doses of harsh realism that remind us that comedy is always in context—it never exists by itself.

Sullivan’s Travels Criterion Collection Blu-ray

Aspect Ratio	1.37:1
Audio	English Linear PCM 1.0 Monaural
Subtitles	English
Supplements	Audio commentary from 2001 by filmmakers Noah Baumbach, Kenneth Bowser, Christopher Guest, and Michael McKean Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer (1990) documentary New video essay by film critic David Cairns, featuring filmmaker Bill Forsyth Interview with Sandy Sturges, the director’s widow, from 2001 Interview with Sturges by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper from 1951 Archival audio recordings of Sturges Essay by critic Stuart Klawans
Distributor	The Criterion Collection
SRP	$39.98
Release Date	April 14, 2015

VIDEO
The new high-definition digital presentation of Sullivan’s Travels was created by Universal from a restored 35mm nitrate fine-grain. Criterion’s 2001 DVD was good for its time, but the Blu-ray gives us a noticeably better picture—not just sharper and with stronger detail, but the new restoration has removed almost all of the minor damage and spotting that was apparent on the previous transfer. This movie, which is now nearly 75 years old, looks gorgeous, with the 1080p image bringing out the finest of details and subtle gradations in the black-and-white palette. Grain has a strong presence and thankfully hasn’t been smoothed out (there is some inconsistency original to the elements that makes some sequences seem a bit grainier than others). The lossless Linear PCM monaural soundtrack, remastered at 24-bit from a 35mm magnetic track made from the original 35mm soundtrack negative, is clean and clear, with almost no hiss and very few aural artifacts. Dialogue is always clear and sharp, and the musical score by Charles Bradshaw and Leo Shuken sounds quite solid with some real depth at times.
SUPPLEMENTS
Criterion’s Blu-Ray keeps almost all of the supplements that were originally included on their 2001 DVD, starting with Kenneth Bowser’s excellent 1990 documentary Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer, which was produced for PBS’s American Masters series (Variety film critic Todd McCarthy wrote the script and won an Emmy for it). Running 76 minutes in length, it is an in-depth look at Sturges’s entire life, from his carefree years living with his unorthodox mother in Europe, to his astounding commercial and critical success in Hollywood in the early 1940s, to his sudden decline and collapse in the 1950s. In many ways, his is a sad story, as one gets the impression of a genius whose own ambition eventually buried him. Still, it is a poignant and exceptionally well-produced documentary with interviews from some of Sturges’s closest friends, including his widow, Sandy Sturges, and actors Cesar Romero and Betty Hutton, as well as archival interview footage of actor Joel McCrea and film critic and auteur theorist Andrew Sarris, among others. Kenneth Bowser also contributes to an intriguing screen-specific audio commentary, which also includes the voices of filmmaker Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming, The Squid and the Whale) and actor/filmmakers Christopher Guest and Michael McKean (This is Spinal Tap). Because there are four diverse personalities contributing to the commentary, it has an eclectic feel, covering everything from Sturges’s personal life, to close textual analyses of various scenes, to ruminations on the social significance of Veronica Lake’s “peek-a-boo curl” hairstyle. The commentary, like the movie itself, is alternately hilarious and very perceptive. The Sturges family has supplied two rare personal audio recordings, one in which Sturges sings “My Love,” one of the many songs he composed during his lifetime, and another in which he reads the Justin Huntly poem “If I Were King,” which was the basis of Sturges’s 1938 screenplay of the same title. Yet another rare recording of Sturges is a four-minute interview he did in 1951 with Hedda Hopper on her radio program, Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood. As if all that weren’t enough, there is also an interview with Sandy Sturges, videotaped at her home in January 2001, in which she discusses her husband’s work (including an amusing anecdote about how he came to write his first play), as well as his decline in the 1950s and his ill-fated partnership with Howard Hughes. The only new supplement is a 19-minute video essay (humorously titled Ants in Your Pants of 1941) by film critic David Cairns, which features insight and commentary by filmmaker Bill Forsyth. Unfortunately, a few things have been lost, notably a wealth of rare archival artifacts relating to Sturges and the movie. Missing is a gallery of dozens of original storyboards and numerous blueprints for the movie’s sets, which included an option to see stills from the movie shot on those sets from particular angles. There are also missing galleries of production stills, behind-the-scenes photographs, and publicity shots of Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake, as well as a “scrapbook” gallery of press clippings, publicity materials, and correspondence, all from UCLA’s Sturges archive. So, if you have it, hold onto your DVD!

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

Overall Rating: (4)