Sullivan's Travels

   I'm gonna make it! I'm gonna make the National Film Registry!

  Talk about contrast from my last entry. I had never heard of this film until I started working on the Film Registry Project, even though it gave the title to one of my favorite films - O Brother, Where Art Thou?. It was Veronica Lake's first starring role and certainly launched an interesting career. It's been called the "best movie about making movies". I don't know if I'd go that far, but it does move well between fun jaunt and a message picture. It even has a sequence that likely inspired Lucille Ball's slapstick in The Long, Long Trailer.

 So for those who are also unfamiliar with this picture, the basic gist is that a typical Hollywood silver spoon director (titular Sullivan) wants to make a socially conscious picture during the Depression. He has read a book called O Brother, Where Art Thou? and been deeply touched by the daily toils of the great unwashed. While he has always made light and frothy comedies, he now wants to make a picture of stark realism. With that end in sight, he decides to dress up as a tramp and go out on the road with ten cents to his name, so he can experience some "real suffering". The studio decides it's a good publicity gig, and sends a fully-loaded touring bus to watch this "real suffering". He finally escapes them, and instead hooks up with a nameless never-was who buys him breakfast. She is disgusted to find out he's a wealthy man slumming it, but joins him jumping trains and begging food, until the experiment is over. At which point, like many respectable people, he is hit by a train.

  Okay, he's not hit by a train, the bum that robbed him is hit by a train, and Sullivan is arrested for assaulting a railroad worker while dazed and disoriented. Everyone, especially the Girl, mourn Sullivan's untimely death in pursuit of ART. However, his stint in the penal farm finally gets across what every person who had experienced poverty was trying to tell him. A poor black church (implied by the setting to be somewhere in the Deep South) invites the convicts to watch a film at evening services. It's an old Pluto cartoon, and everyone is laughing themselves silly. Sullivan finally gets it. The poor do not need the rich to tell them they are miserable. They would appreciate a good laugh far more than any amount of sobering message pictures.

  Which... I suppose is true to a certain extent. Certainly the high points of escapism in film come in times of poverty and despair. The worse the economy is, the more lavish costume dramas, the more special effects laden epics, the more films there are of the lives of the rich and glamorous. As the economy betters, our taste for gritty realism comes back, and a slew of message pictures and lugubrious philosophical works come out. Then again, with the rising price of movies, the bad economy now sometimes supports message pictures - if it can convince the audience that they're socially relevant and artistically worthy.

  But the crux of the matter is the heavy contrast with my last review. The basic argument of the picture is that a film that makes people laugh and feel good is the most worthy of all films, because all some people have is laughter. On the other hand, Sullivan's Travels is a pre-Holocaust picture. The idea of using film to inform or educate wasn't new in 1941, but opinions certainly changed with the stark newsreels that Eisenhower returned with. So there's the question: is the message picture truly not worth as much as the comedy?

  For me, the answer lies in between. I like comedies. I like good comedies, like this one, and good comedies, like the ones it inspired. I also appreciate message pictures and understand where the good ones are coming from. It's a much harder genre to do correctly - as anyone who has seen Captain Planet surely knows. But it's such an important thing to viscerally see how other people exist on film, and not just in documentaries. Based on the time period, I don't think the premise was exactly flawed, but it isn't really one that holds up.

  Which doesn't stop this from being a charming film that I would suggest to anyone.