Sullivan’s Travels

Sullivan’s Travels – Preston Sturges’ 1941 comedy-drama has the status of a classic and is too well-known to warrant much commentary. I have never been as enthusiastic about this picture as others. It seems to be that the documentary-style episodes showing the film director, John Sullivan, and Veronica Lake, touring various soup kitchens and shanty- towns don’t exactly work. The miserable and down-trodden are conceived Soviet-style as a group, not as individuals, although Sturges’ casting directors found plenty of amazing faces with which to people these sections. Nonetheless, one has the dismaying sense that that Sturges’ concept of the poor is as stereotyped as that of his hero. The film is cleverly constructed, however, that any criticism that one can make about it with respect to authenticity or compassion is already disarmed – of course, the film proclaims, this is a Hollywood version of poverty and, inherently, not to be trusted. But I think this all-purpose defense to a viewer’s criticisms is a little over-powerful. Clearly, there are moments when Sturges wants to proceed in a documentary style but the glamour of his leading man and lady don’t allow for this approach to the material. The chain-gang scenes remains disturbing and Sturges redeems the racially-tinged humor involving a black cook in the film’s second reel with a moving portrait of an African-American rural country church that is dignified, if a bit too stereotyped for modern tastes. The point is clear, however, and lacerating. Sturges’ hero has fallen below being a black man or woman in the hierarchy of class in America. As a convict, Joel McCrae is lower than a Negro – at least in the eyes white middle class Americans, and, presumably, in the eyes of the audience intended for this picture. In the aftermath of the election of 2012, there is something resonant about the spectacle of a big tour bus motoring through America so that a great man can safely press the flesh with the common folks. I admire this picture without liking it as much as I should – you recall the ending, of course, and the beginning, but the rest is always a blur in your memory. The script is brilliant and the film contains several of the greatest stretches of dialogue and speechifying in American cinema but the pictorial aspect of the movie, its pictures don’t exactly persuade me of the truth of a message that we should all take to heart.