311 - Sullivan's Travels, United States, 1941. Dir. Preston Sturges.

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

311 - Sullivan's Travels, United States, 1941.  Dir. Preston Sturges.

Whatever the story, a talking picture is only as good as its dialogue.  I believe good dialogue is the cheapest insurance a producer can buy. - Preston Sturges to Jesse L. Lasky.

Preston Sturges paved the way for a new kind of talent in Hollywood.

The Writer-Director.

Before him, writers worked in committees, were paid their salary, and had little say in the final outcome of the pictures on which they worked.

Sturges changed all that.

John Huston and Billy Wilder followed shortly after.  Then Orson Welles and Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

Woody Allen.  Quentin Tarantino.  Wes Anderson.  Paul Thomas Anderson.  David O. Russell.  Joss Whedon.  Christopher Nolan.

It is common today.

Of course Charlie Chaplin came before him, but he owned his own studio.  Sturges worked for a major studio, Paramount, and he had to negotiate his way into being allowed to direct his own script.  He did it by selling the screenplay to The Great McGinty for $1 in order to be allowed to direct, and then turning in a money-making hit.

This was after twenty-five movies had been made with him as writer alone.  Twenty-five.

The Great McGinty started a string of a dozen in a decade, including eight in five years at Paramount, after which his place as one of the great American comedic filmmakers was secured.

John L. "Sully" Sullivan is a successful studio director of light comedies.  His hits include such titles as So Long Sarong, Hey-Hey in the Hayloft, and Ants in Your Plants of 1939.  The studio executives love him.  He brings home the bacon.  But he is dissatisfied.  He wants to make a serious picture.  Something socially serious.  The Grapes of Wrath is in the air.  And Frank Capra.  He wants to make a picture about the hard life of rural Great Depression and call it O Brother Where Art Thou?

Yes!  Sullivan's Travels, which ostensibly gets its name from Gulliver's Travels, in turn gives the name to the Coen Brothers' 2000 film O Brother Where Art Thou?, which in turn pretends to be an adaptation of The Odyssey,

Sullivan, who grew up in boarding schools for the wealthy, wants to live the life of a hobo so that he can understand poverty and suffering.  His bosses understand this to be a mistake.  They try to talk him out of it.  They acknowledge that there is precedent for serious social movies to make money, but he is not the man for the job.  He is the last one who would understand the plight of the poor.  When they fail to talk him out of it, they end up following him in a publicity RV, a "land yacht," in order to milk the story for promotion.

He convinces them to wait two weeks for him in Las Vegas, and during that time he meets a struggling girl, a washed-up extra on her way out of town.  She is kind to him, and he is impressed.  He tries to help her without revealing who he really is, but through a series of unfortunate events, she comes to understand.  And by then, she wants to be with him.

So they set out again, this time together, and they experience the kind of hardships one can go back and write about without having ever really experienced any.

It will take another turn of events before Sullivan will learn what real hardship means.

And Sturges brilliantly inserts serious social commentary into a comedy that otherwise affirms comedy while satirizing serious social commentary.  He knows how to communicate while remaining in his wheelhouse.

Of course Sullivan is named after Gulliver, and his story stands in the tradition of that other satire, but he is also named after a contemporaneously famous boxer named John L. Sullivan.

The title O Brother Where Art Thou? was also alluded to in several other works before the Coen Brothers made their feature.  Naturally, they would make theirs a comedy more in the vein of Sullivan's Travels than in The Odyssey, which they stated later that they had not read.

During a conversation with the Girl, Sully tosses out the name of another fictional film, Hold Back Tomorrow.  A film with that title came out a few years later in 1955, directed by Hugo Haas.

In the end Sullivan will learn his lesson not from his amateurish efforts at hoboing, but while listening to a sermon in a black church, while being arrested and put on a chain gang, and while watching Mickey Mouse and Pluto in Walt Disney's 1934 Playful Pluto.

The insights he finally gains from these experiences will form his new aesthetic.

Which is an affirmation of his old one.

"There's a lot to be said for making people laugh.  Did you know that that's all some people have? . . . It's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan."