Title: Sullivan’s Travels
Rating: 2 Stars
In my continuing quest to watch all films from the 2008 AFI best films list as I’m listening to the Unspooled podcast, Sullivan’s Travels came up. This was maybe one of three or so films that are on the list that I’ve never heard of (others being The Best Years of Our Lives and Sunrise: A Song of Two Lives). It was written by Preston Sturges, a legendary filmmaker that I knew very little about. Sturges’ was best known for his 1930s era screwball comedies, which is a format that I generally enjoy.
The protagonist of the film is John L Sullivan (Joel McCrea). He is a successful Hollywood director (not the famous boxer, it’s a little perplexing to me why Sturges named his protagonist the exact same name as a boxer). He’s best known for directing comedies. However, Sullivan is disenchanted. He feels that his films are lightweight and frivolous. He wants to do a serious film dealing with the weighty struggles of the poor. Given the life of ease that he lives, the studio executives mock his ability to create a truly empathetic portrait of this struggle.
Sullivan acknowledges that the criticism is valid. Instead of abandoning the project, he proposes to temporarily throw off all of his wealth and live the life of a pauper. This causes the studio executives to panic at the thought of their most valuable property being so vulnerable, so they put a support system in place to make sure that no serious harm comes to him.
Sullivan then goes off on his adventure. In a cafe, he meets a young woman (Veronica Lake) that, out of pity, buys him lunch. She joins him on his adventure.
After a lighthearted start where, despite his best intentions, Sullivan always ends up back in Hollywood, things take a dark turn. He and The Girl (that is literally the name of the character) end up living hard lives in soup kitchens. Deciding that he’s had enough and convinced that he now has a deeper understanding of poverty, he goes back to his former life in Hollywood.
Still wanting to help the homeless, Sullivan decides that the best approach is to hand out five dollar bills. The plan goes awry when someone sneaks up on him, knocks him on the head, steals his money, and throws his unconscious body on a passing freight train. Sullivan comes to in a freight yard, and in a confused state, attacks a railroad worker.
For the attack, he’s sentenced to hard labor. While there, he regains his memory and desperately seeks a way out. Due to a weird set of circumstances, people back in Hollywood believe that he has been murdered. Sullivan decides to confess to his own murder in the hope that his picture will subsequently appear in newspapers. The Girl recognizes him, runs to the studio executives, and he is freed. Now free, he recognizes that in hard times that his light comedies are valuable because they bring needed cheer and resolves to continue to make them.
It’s kind of an odd film. It certainly starts off as a fairly conventional screw ball comedy. There is an extended chase scene played purely for laughs. The early scenes where he continues to end up back in Hollywood are humorous.
I’m not sure what Sturges politics are, but Sullivan is portrayed as, what would have been called in the 1970s, a limousine liberal. He is full of sympathy for the poor but really has no true empathy or understanding of them. He thinks, if he puts on raggedy clothes with a dime in his pocket for a month or so, that he’ll have a complete understanding of what it means to be poor. Even in prison (for assaulting a man, a crime that he totally committed), he feels injustice that a man of wealth such of himself has to do time. He doesn’t seem all that concerned about the other prisoners sharing his fate.
Even though he did assault the man and is appropriately sentenced for the crime, once his true identity is identified, he apparently is immediately released. Why? Rich men don’t go to jail if they hit a man with a rock?
It just seemed odd that, on the one hand, the film is clearly satirizing wealthy people that possess false empathy for the poor, but the film itself doesn’t seem to be lacking in such empathy itself.
dorkenstein 