When looking at a film like “Sullivan’s Travels,” not just a daring satire of the movie industry but a window into the mind and thoughts of its creator, it’s impossible to know where to begin the discussion when it’s a work that operates on so many levels – a journey of self-discovery, a parody of class roles, an unlikely romance, etc.
Having said that, I think it’s appropriate – unavoidable, really – to call “Sullivan’s Travels”, a film about a movie director who undergoes a career crisis, the most personal film in Sturges’ celebrated filmography.
It’s natural to approach John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), the titular director who puts aside his rudderless existence as a maker of musical comedies to take on a life of hardship in an effort to research his new “commentary on modern conditions”, as Sturges himself. After all, this a man who makes a madcap farce out of conceivably every possible social dilemma.
What’s so brilliant about “Sullivan’s Travels” is just how self-aware and slyly critical the film is not just towards the movie industry in general (in particular the ongoing debate between commercialism vs. art) but towards the way the upper class perceives their role towards the low and needy. As the character Burrows (played by Robert Greig) says, “the poor know all about poverty and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamorous.”
So out of the studio and into the railyards goes John L. Sullivan to find the meaning of hardship, but only under the supervision of a trailer full of on-the-job babysitters. After a wacky attempt to escape, Sullivan soon loses his tail and picks up a companion, the glamorous but hard-luck actress, played by Veronica Lake.
Such an odd pairing provides Sturges the opportunity not only to comment on the banality of Hollywood stereotypes, but to write one of the better lines in his career: “How does the girl fit into the picture?” a policeman asks. “There’s always a girl in the picture. What’s the matter? Don’t you go to the movies?”
This exchange is traded at a Beverly Hills Police Station, one of the many times that Sullivan hilariously winds up back in Hollywood, as if unseen forces are warning him to drop the hobo routine for good. Eventually, fed up with sleeping on crowded floors, he does decide to head back to the comforts of his mansion, only to be bizarrely mistaken for dead after a botched robbery.
It’s here, when Sullivan finds himself on a chain gang and unable to contact his Hollywood brethren, that Sturges turns the film on its ear, slowing things down so as to heighten the desperation of Sullivan’s homeward quest to restore sanity.
In another movie, the last act might have been more of a drag, but Sturges’ sure-handed direction, including the beautiful church entrance scene set to “Go Down, Moses,” provides a smooth transition. It’s here where Sullivan, after witnessing a jumble of deadbeat prisoners and African-American churchgoers erupt in laughter at the sight of a cartoon, realizes that sometimes making people laugh isn’t a shameful role to play after all.
And although this message of self-justification applies to both Sullivan and Sturges, and although it’s not something I wholeheartedly agree with, it’s a masterful stroke of ingenuity to see a filmmaker so willingly lay out all of his doubts and anxieties on the record and to do so with such verve and panache.
Plus, I think Sturges is selling himself short – his films aren’t merely cartoons of physical comedy and broad laughs. In his case, a maker of films both socially relevant and breathlessly funny, he can have his cake and eat it too. [A-]
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