Directed By: Preston Sturges
Starring: Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake, Robert Warwick
Tag line: "A Happy-Go Lucky Hitch-Hiker on the Highway to happiness! He wanted to see the world . . . but wound up in Lover's Lane!"
Trivia: Veronica Lake was six months pregnant at the beginning of production, a fact she didn't tell Sturges until filming began. Sturges was so furious when he learned that, according to Lake, he had to be physically restrained
Preston Sturges’ 1941 comedy with a conscience, Sullivan’s Travels stars Joel McCrea as movie director John Lloyd Sullivan, whose films (Ants in Your Plants of 1939) are incredibly popular. Yet despite all his success, Sullivan longs to make a socially relevant movie, one that reflects the poverty and despair currently gripping the nation.
To research this dream project, a human drama he will title O Brother, Where art Thou, Sullivan poses as a hobo, and, with only $0.10 in his pocket, sets out to experience what it's like to be jobless and hungry.
On his travels, Sullivan meets a would-be actress (Veronica Lake) who joins him on his grand adventure. Together, the two live among the poor and destitute, sleeping on mission floors and eating in soup kitchens.
Convinced he’s now ready to tackle O Brother, Where Art Thou, Sullivan returns to the Hollywood fold. But when he attempts to reward the needy who aided him in his research, he's finally exposed to true suffering.
Joel McCrae is entirely believable as the well-meaning yet naïve title character, and the early scenes depicting his journey to poverty row are played almost entirely for laughs. After ditching the “land yacht”, a large bus rented by the studio to follow him and ensure their most successful filmmaker doesn’t get into trouble, Sullivan visits a farm owned and operated by an elderly widow (Almira Sessions) and her sister (Esther Howard). They offer Sullivan room and board in exchange for his doing odd-jobs (chopping wood, etc). When the widow takes a liking to him, Sullivan sneaks out in the middle of the night and hitches a ride, only to end up back in Hollywood! Even his budding relationship with the struggling actress (Lake’s character is never given a name) plays out like a romantic comedy. In one very funny scene, the two learn that leaping from a moving train is twice as difficult as hopping onto one.
Then, at about the film's halfway mark, director Sturges throws his audience a curve by changing the entire tone, taking what had been a lively comedy and transforming it into a drama ripe with social commentary.
The trouble begins when Sullivan, feeling he has completed his mission, again visits the poor, this time to hand out $5 bills as a “thank you” for opening his eyes to their plight. Before he can do so, however, he is jumped by a vagrant and knocked unconscious. Dragging Sullivan’s limp body into an abandoned railway car and stealing his shoes, the vagrant then runs off, only to be struck and killed by a passing train.
This kicks off a chain of events that takes Sullivan's Travels in a very dark direction. Having giving us plenty to laugh about early on, Sturges, with these later scenes, stirs our emotions in a much different, yet equally satisfying way.
Wonderfully acted and expertly paced, Sullivan’s Travels is a marvelous motion picture.
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