Sullivan’s Travels, 1941. Directed and written by the inimitable Preston Sturges. Starring Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake (who’s on the take), the great curmudgeon William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Robert Greig, Eric Blore, Porter Hall, Charles R. Moore, and Jimmy Conlin.
Playing in Loring Park with Sengalese band Daara J; part of the Walker’s Summer Music and Movies.
You cannot, in any way, shape or form, find a better thing to do tonight than see Sullivan’s Travels in Loring Park. If the rains come, head on over to the Walker and see it. Call in sick if you work. Tell your lunkheaded boyfriend to go fly a kite if he’s against classic comedies. Skip class, call the babysitter (or better yet, take the kids), walk the dogs later. This is just about the best movie you could see this summer, on the big screen, sitting on the grass while the city pulsates behind you. There’s nothing better.
Director Preston Sturges was a weirdo of the highest order: bumped around Europe by his free-loving mother, who was a friend of Isadora Duncan; wound up in the cosmetics biz where he invented a kiss-proof lipstick; wrote a smash Broadway comedy on his first try; then, as the Depression hit, turned to movies. He made a lost classic in The Power and the Glory, no relation to the excellent Graham Greene novel, whose non-linear plot was a supposed influence on Citizen Kane. Then Preston Sturges got serious and created a string of the most madcap comedies in Hollywood history, and films that blew a raspberry in the face of rigid American mores of the early 1940s.
One of which, and perhaps his best (though I personally love the lesser-admired Hail the Conquering Hero, a movie ripe for a remake), is Sullivan’s Travels. It’s the crazy story of a director, John L. Lloyd Sullivan, a depression-era filmmaker of light comedies, such as Ants in Your Pants of 1939 and Hey Hey in the Hayloft. Like many Hollywood personalities, poor Sullivan has a notion to do something of lasting worth. So he gets it into his head to make a serious film entitled O Brother, Where Art Thou (sound familiar?), to address the crushing conditions of his day. Only he grew up with a silver spoon in his piehole and has no idea what it means to be poor. So, disguised as a hobo, he hits the road to live hand to mouth and bum rides on trains.
Well, as you would expect, he gets more than he bargained for. In Sturges’ capable hands, the guy is at first followed by a coterie of reporters, doctors and filmmakers; ends up in the bedrooms of oversexed widows; and ends up wooing the fetching Veronica Lake. There’s car chases, people falling into pools, and a whole pile of slapstick to frost the confection. But somehow, Sturges is able to have his cake and eat it too: Sullivan, like Preston’s other wonderful films (the ones from 1940-44), has both gales of laughter and soft breezes of melancholy.
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