| Collector's Corner July 2007
 Sullivan's
Travels
- Starring: Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake,
Robert Warwick, William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Porter Hall
- Director: Preston Sturges
- Theatrical release: 1941
- DVD releases: 2001/2006
Video: Fullscreen
Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0
Released by: The Criterion
Collection/Universal
Director Preston Sturges was born Edmund Preston Biden in
Chicago in 1898, the son of prominent American socialites, and spent his youth in Europe.
His mother was a sexually active woman who considered monogamy to be for the poor. She
owned a makeup and women’s furnishings business, and liked to run around with Isadora
Duncan and her crowd of wild artists. Freud would have had a heyday analyzing Sturges.
Sturges worked for his mother’s firm, Maison Desti,
served in the US Army Signal Corps in World War I, returned to work for his mother, then
spent some time inventing things, but generally he lived the life of an idle rich boy. In
his late 20s, while laid up with an illness, Sturges began to write, and eventually had
some minor success scripting Broadway shows. When talking pictures came along, Sturges
figured the actors would have to have something to say, so he moved to Hollywood. In the
1930s, he wrote a couple of filmscripts per year, including two classics: If I Were
King (1938) and Remember the Night (1940). But by 1940, Sturges was
furious at how directors and actors toyed with his lines. So he went to the powers at
Paramount and asked to direct his latest work, The Great McGinty, a hard-hitting
script that was a satirical thrashing of politicians. Based on his prior successes, they
agreed, on two conditions: they’d pay him only $10, and he had to use cheap talent.
The film was a huge success. Suddenly, Sturges was a director.
In the next four years Sturges wrote and directed seven
classic comedies: The Great McGinty (1940), Christmas in July (1940), The
Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan’s Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story
(1942), The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), and Hail the Conquering Hero
(1944). By the end of 1944, he was famous for his populist comedies, and for making more
money than anyone else in Hollywood. Then he decided he had to make a serious film to
cement his place in the pantheon of eminent directors. The Great Moment is about
William Thomas Green Morton, the dentist who discovered anesthesia, and audiences found it
about as stimulating as ether. Paramount took the film out of Sturges’s hands,
re-edited it, and didn’t release it until 1944, two years after Sturges had shot it.
Sturges blamed Paramount for the film’s failure and left the studio. Four years later
he made Unfaithfully Yours (1948), a hilarious sendup of jealousy among artistes,
but the post-WWII audience, many of whom had been through life-changing events, were
looking for something grittier and more true to life. Sturges’s rocketing career fell
to earth as fast as it had ascended.
 Sullivan’s Travels shows
the best of Preston Sturges’s wit and artistic vision. The story will sound familiar:
A fabulously successful director of light comedies decides he must make a serious film to
cement his place in the pantheon of eminent directors. Joel McCrea plays the director,
John L. "Sully" Sullivan. His new film will be called O Brother, Where Art
Thou? (the Coen brothers’ inspiration for their film of that title), and for
research, Sully decides to become a hobo and travel among the poor so he can see "a
true canvas of the suffering of humanity."
When his studio hears about Sully’s plans, they decide
to make it a publicity stunt, setting Sully up with limos, and servants to dress him down
each day. He thinks he’s seeing the real thing, and feels so strongly for the poor
wretches that he heads to the railyard with $1000 worth of $10 bills to hand out. One of
the less savory hobos knocks Sully on the head and steals his money and clothes. When,
minutes later, the hobo is killed by a train, the world thinks the body is Sully’s.
He then seizes the moment to truly disappear into the other side, and becomes a genuine
hobo. That’s when his life goes crazy. And there’s a further complication. As
Sully says, "There’s always a girl in the picture. Haven’t you ever
been to the movies?" This girl is the gorgeous Veronica Lake, and she turns
Sully’s head 180 degrees.
Which provides a handy introduction to Sturges’s
"11 Rules for the Box Office":
- A pretty girl is better than a plain one.
- A leg is better than an arm.
- A bedroom is better than a living room.
- An arrival is better that a departure.
- A birth is better than a death.
- A chase is better than a chat.
- A dog is better than a landscape.
- A kitten is better than a dog.
- A baby is better than a kitten.
- A kiss is better than a baby.
- A pratfall is better than anything.
By Sturges’s own rules, Sullivan’s Travels qualifies
as a work of genius. Audiences and critics both applauded the film. A reviewer in Variety
wrote, "Sullivan’s Travels is a curious but effective mixture of grim
tragedy, slapstick of the Keystone brand and smart, trigger-fast comedy." Bosley
Crowther hailed it in the New York Times, writing "Folks in the picture
business are talking nervously about ‘escapist’ films. These are times for
nothing but the most frivolous or robust fare, they say. Audiences are not interested in
anything which stimulates the intellect or prods the human emotions with too sharp or
poignant a thrust. Yet Mr. Sturges’s picture, which apparently says those same
things, is a perfectly splendid example of a thoughtful, sensitive film which entertains.
In a manner remarkably facile, Mr. Sturges flings his own teeth into his own words."
Modern-day production companies also rate Sullivan’s
Travels a classic, which means we have two great options on DVD. The best came out in
2001, when The Criterion Collection did their normal superlative job of remastering, then
added a gaggle of useful extras, including the PBS American Masters installment
about Sturges, storyboards, production stills, and a scrapbook of publicity materials. The
single disc will run you about $36. (The film is also available from another source, with
no extras, for about $14, but beware: most of the copies being sold are Korean imports
that don’t do justice to Sturges’s work.)
 For the adventurous
soul looking for ten hours of laughs, Universal offers a bonanza in Preston Sturges:
The Filmmaker Collection. The seven-disc set includes almost all of his work from 1940
to 1944: The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve,
Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, Hail the Conquering Hero,
The Great Moment. Universal has mostly spiffed up the picture quality, but there are
no extras. And why they would choose to include his anesthesia stinker and leave out The
Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is beyond me. The latter was one of Sturges’s most
daring works, about an unwed mother and the town that adopts her. I wonder how he got that
one past the censors of 1944. Anyway, you can buy the box for about $40; add Morgan’s
Creek for another $12, and you’ll have all of Sturges’s important films.
Just make sure you watch Sullivan’s Travels first.
Sturges began to direct at a time when Hollywood was
starting to look too full of itself. With men and women dying in wars in Europe and Asia,
the frilly lifestyles of the Hollywood set, reported so painstakingly by the major news
services, looked silly. Sturges, no stranger to the high life, was well aware of its
foibles. You can feel his glee as, in Sullivan’s Travels, he skewers the more
fatuous aspects of Hollywood’s noblesse oblige. He then hammers the message home by
elevating both the dignity and joyfulness of the poor. Sullivan’s Travels is
populism at its finest, a work as rich in the thoughtful dissection of classism as it is
proud of the grit and charm of the common man. It even has kisses and pratfalls.
Walter White, then secretary of the NAACP, wrote a letter
to Sturges after seeing Sullivan’s Travels that, in light of the racial
injustice that reigned in 1941, is particularly moving: "I want to congratulate and
thank you for the church sequence in Sullivan’s Travels. This is one of the
most moving scenes I have seen in a moving picture for a long time. But I am particularly
grateful to you, as are a number of my friends, both white and colored, for the dignified
and decent treatment of Negroes in this scene. I was in Hollywood recently and am to
return there soon for conferences with production heads, writers, directors, and actors
and actresses in an effort to induce broader and more decent picturization of the Negro
instead of limiting him to menial or comic roles. The sequence in Sullivan’s
Travels is a step in that direction and I want you to know how grateful we are."
It seems Sturges understood that populism also meant
inclusiveness.
...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com |
