I knew I was going to be getting to a lot of foreign films for my upcoming 2023 movie challenge (see the Stacker Challenge page for details), so I decided to subscribe to the Criterion Channel. I’d been thinking about it for a while regardless. Regardless, I went scrolling through their collection and found Preston Sturges’s 1941 Hollywood satire Sullivan’s Travels. Honestly, I’ve been looking to watch this one for a long time, and it was right there.
Of course I checked it out.
Big time movie director John L Sullivan (Joel McCrea) has spent his career specializing in popular comedies, but he aspires to do more. He wants his movies to really say something about the world, something that shows the suffering of the common man. Small problem, as pointed out by his bosses at the studio: he’s never really suffered in his life. What does he know about suffering? The worst he has happening is a greedy, estranged wife who won’t divorce him. To that end, Sullivan decides to dress up like a hobo and hit the road to experience some suffering.
It doesn’t quite work out as planned as the studio arranges for a lot of people to follow him, and he soon finds the hardest part of getting out of Hollywood and experiencing the world is simply getting out of Hollywood. He soon finds a companion in a wannabe actress referred to only as “The Girl” (Veronica Lake), and with her help, he might learn about suffering. Or he might get into even bigger trouble. He’s a comedy director in a comedy movie. There’s bound to be more problems than he could have hoped for.
Oh man, this one was funny. It had good characters, good wordplay, and good slapstick. An early highlight, for example, has Sullivan wishing to ditch the bus following him as he first tries to become a hobo. To that end, he flags down a ride, and of all the possible vehicles that could have picked him up here, this was probably the last one I might have predicted. Likewise, the satire was sharp. Sure, I’ve probably seen sharper, but for 1941, this was pretty darn sharp. Sullivan is the sort of character you can root for but at the same time, it’s nice to see him suffer a bit since he’s pretty full of himself.
As for Lake, she’s fine, but this is one of the things about older movies that I sometimes get a special thrill from, namely picking up on references from other things. Lake is clearly the physical model for Jessica Rabbit, and like the first time I saw a Marlene Dietrich movie to see just how on-point and pitch perfect Madeline Kahn’s impression of her was in Blazing Saddles. Her characrter is a no-nonsense sort of woman who knows how to deflate Sullivan as needed, but man, just seeing her look and realizing where I’d sort of seen it before was a lot of fun. Now…why didn’t her character have a name? Did they forget?
Eh, it may not matter.
Grade: A
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