Joel McCrea plays Sullivan, a big-time director of movie comedies and musicals, who decides he wants to direct a film with a message, and rides the rails as a bum to find out what it's like to be poor. He takes with him Veronica Lake, playing a Hollywood starlet wannabe who's just about ready to throw in the towel. Together, they find out that they can't really ever know what it's like to be poor unless they're actually poor, a fate that eventually befalls Sullivan through a crazy turn of events, after which he rediscovers the value of using film to make people laugh.
"Sullivan's Travels" is one of those reflexive movies about Hollywood and the business of film making that can be wonderful when done well and entirely too self conscious when done poorly. I can't imagine writer/director Preston Sturges having done a better job than he does here with this simply marvelous film, easily one of the best of the 1940s and perhaps one of the best ever. Rarely have I felt that a director has made his point as clearly and effectively as Sturges does with this film. He manipulates his audience dexterously but not cheaply. When the film takes a dark and sobering turn, we fidget anxiously and wait for it to get funny again, which is exactly the reaction the studio executives in the film's opening tell Sullivan he can expect from his "important" film, and why they tell him to stick to comedy in the first place. The irony of course is that in making a film about the value of mindless comedy, Sturges at the same time made a quite important picture that more forcefully addressed the plight of the working man than any number of other films that treated the subject more seriously.
I've never liked Joel McCrea better than I do here. His laconic way with a one liner is perfectly suited to Sturges' brand of quick and witty writing. Indeed, the patter comes at you so quickly that your brain may have trouble keeping up with the jokes. Veronica Lake is cute and droll, and she and McCrea get on well together. The film's best moments come when the pair are learning how to be hobos. And Sturges fills out the rest of his film with a cast of regulars from his stable of character actors, with virtually every member getting some bit of business or a line to remember him by.
However, despite Sturges' wonderful dialogue, the film's most memorable and beautiful moment comes when everybody shuts up, and a montage of scenes showing McCrea and Lake experiencing life as it was for countless homeless and unemployed regular Americans at the tail end of the Depression plays out with no sound, accompanied only by a pretty musical passage. In a movie that will take your breath away with its pace and crack comic timing, this moment will take your breath away for different reasons altogether.
Grade: A+
"Sullivan's Travels" is one of those reflexive movies about Hollywood and the business of film making that can be wonderful when done well and entirely too self conscious when done poorly. I can't imagine writer/director Preston Sturges having done a better job than he does here with this simply marvelous film, easily one of the best of the 1940s and perhaps one of the best ever. Rarely have I felt that a director has made his point as clearly and effectively as Sturges does with this film. He manipulates his audience dexterously but not cheaply. When the film takes a dark and sobering turn, we fidget anxiously and wait for it to get funny again, which is exactly the reaction the studio executives in the film's opening tell Sullivan he can expect from his "important" film, and why they tell him to stick to comedy in the first place. The irony of course is that in making a film about the value of mindless comedy, Sturges at the same time made a quite important picture that more forcefully addressed the plight of the working man than any number of other films that treated the subject more seriously.
I've never liked Joel McCrea better than I do here. His laconic way with a one liner is perfectly suited to Sturges' brand of quick and witty writing. Indeed, the patter comes at you so quickly that your brain may have trouble keeping up with the jokes. Veronica Lake is cute and droll, and she and McCrea get on well together. The film's best moments come when the pair are learning how to be hobos. And Sturges fills out the rest of his film with a cast of regulars from his stable of character actors, with virtually every member getting some bit of business or a line to remember him by.
However, despite Sturges' wonderful dialogue, the film's most memorable and beautiful moment comes when everybody shuts up, and a montage of scenes showing McCrea and Lake experiencing life as it was for countless homeless and unemployed regular Americans at the tail end of the Depression plays out with no sound, accompanied only by a pretty musical passage. In a movie that will take your breath away with its pace and crack comic timing, this moment will take your breath away for different reasons altogether.
Grade: A+