I've done my write-up for Frank Capra, so I feel obligated to have an entry for the director I always mixed him up with, Preston Sturges. Sturges was a master of the screwball comedy and a connoisseur of human foibles and eccentricities. He came to Hollywood as a screenwriter, and only got his shot as a director after a decade in the studio system - and how he broke through to become the first real Hollywood writer/director with significant creative control is the stuff of legend. He was widely admired and envied during his own lifetime for his artistic independence, though this proved to be short-lived after several contentious battles with the studios.
Once Sturges got his shot, it resulted in a spectacular run of comedy films in the 1940s, including "The Lady Eve," "The Miracle of Morgan's Creek," "The Palm Beach Story," and my favorite, "Sullivan's Travels." Because his earlier projects were based on older scripts, "Sullivan's Travels" can be counted as the first movie Sturges really put together as an auteur. It starts as a show business satire that quickly morphs into a cross-country journey of discovery and comedic farce, featuring mistaken identities, screwball romance, and some pointed social commentary. Joel McCrea plays Sullivan, a hotshot young comedy director who decides that he wants to make serious, important films, and travels America as an anonymous tramp in order to get in touch with the plight of the downtrodden. Of course, he gets more than he bargained for.
Sturges has claimed that he wrote the film as a response to the self-serious messages that he saw creeping into comedies, and wanted "Sullivan" to make a stand for the value of a good honest laugh. In order to do this, he essentially did what his protagonist wants to do - he made a socially conscious film about the plight of the downtrodden. In fact, the scenes of poverty and miserable prison life were considered so objectionable, that censors refused to allow the film to be exported overseas. However, the film is also a delightful comedy that punctures the highfalutin' pretensions of Sullivan at every turn, mixing sobering realism with goofy slapstick, acknowledging the harshness of the social divide while simultaneously featuring an effervescent romance that plays out exactly how every other silver screen romance plays out. Somehow, Sturges has his cake and eats it too.
I think the secret to the film is that it's never cynical. It's not a black comedy in any sense, because Sturges is totally earnest in whatever he's showing us from scene to scene - the sobering lives of the poor during the Great Depression, the meet cute between Sullivan and the girl, and Sullivan finally learning the value of a good laugh. Sullivan's crime isn't hypocrisy or narrow-mindedness, but naivete. He honestly doesn't understand or appreciate what his audience needs until he walks a literal mile in their shoes, and the fact that he's so eager to walk that mile makes him terribly likeable. This is also one of Veronica Lake's best roles, making great use of her considerable screen charisma, while also giving her the chance to really play a well-rounded character with some principles and pride and great one liners.
"Sullivan's Travels" is also one of the first films about Hollywood that feels properly grounded in something like the real world. The would-be starlet wants to meet Ernst Lubitsch. Sullivan essentially wants to be Frank Capra at the beginning of the film. His struggle with creative burnout feels completely genuine, and so too does his tone-deaf indulgence of his own ego. The big epiphany takes place during a screening of a Pluto cartoon - a piece of real media that we see being enjoyed by a mixed-race audience. The sequence has become iconic, a beautiful encapsulation of how the audience's relationship to media is often completely different from the filmmakers' or the critics.'
The film decries the socially significant "message film," but its own message remains painfully resonant today - the downtrodden don't need to be told they're downtrodden. They're usually better served by a little escapism and a good laugh. And as someone who frequently gets too wrapped up in artsy, hoity-toity cinema, that's a good lesson to always keep in mind.
What I've Seen - Preston Sturges 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) Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) Unfaithfully Yours (1948)
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