Sullivan's Travels a Humorous Look at Depression-era Hollywood

By Chuck Sudo in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 2, 2012 4:55PM

The screwball comedies of Chicago-born director Preston Sturges were ahead of their time and known for their witty and mature dialogue, despite the farcical situations in which the characters found themselves. Sturges's influence can be found notably on the Coen Brothers, in theme and directorial style.

Sturges's 1941 romp Sullivan's Travels falls somewhere between autobiographical film and a director's mission statement. Joel McRea plays John L. Sullivan, a hotshot director of fluffy studio comedies that rake in beaucoup box office. Yet Sullivan has more serious film aspirations and, against the objections of his bosses, wishes to make a serious film — an adaptation of the Sinclair Beckstein novel O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Sullivan decides to disguise himself as a hobo in order to "know trouble" first-hand and apply that experience to his film making. Yet, no matter how hard he tries he winds up back at square one until he meets Veronica Lake, credited in this movie simply as "The GIrl." With The Girl in tow, Sullivan begins to succeed in living like a tramp a bit too well and, through an escalating series of madcap scenarios, eventually winds up in a Southern chain gang for assaulting a railroad worker, unable to prove that he is a major director.

The lesson learned by Sullivan is that the comedies he believed were lightweight were his greatest contributions to society, because they provided the poor with a portal to forget their situations for a couple of hours. In that, Sullivan's Travels echoed real life and served as another of his biting satires of Hollywood. The movie's message often gets lost in the zany situations Sturges crafts — the leading man and lady looks of McRea and Lake also distract from the theme — but it still gives a peek inside the inner workings of the early studio system and Depression-era America in a manner palatable for the time.

The Northwest Chicago Film Society will screen Sullivan's Travels 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Portage Theater in a newly restored 35 mm print from Universal Pictures. Wednesday's screening is co-sponsored by the non-profit arts collective portoluz as part of its year-long series of programming commemorating the New Deal-era agency, the Works Progress Administration, which was established as a jobs creation program for, among other things, large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects.