Sullivan's Travels

Sullivan’s Travels is a funny, generous film that occasionally makes defending comedy look too easy. Preston Sturges writes and directs a Hollywood comedy about John Sullivan, a filmmaker who wants to make something socially important. He goes looking for experience by dressing as a tramp, confident that this will give him something useful to put on screen. The film has plenty of fun with his confidence, while allowing us to respect his wish to understand poverty.

Joel McCrea gives Sullivan the earnestness the joke needs. He makes the man’s ambition plausible enough that we can enjoy watching it go wrong without simply waiting for him to be humiliated. We laughed at Sullivan’s confidence that dressing as a tramp will qualify him to speak about poverty. The joke depends on the seriousness with which he approaches the disguise. We can see why Sullivan thinks this is a worthwhile undertaking, which makes his failures funnier.

Veronica Lake, credited as The Girl, is essential to keeping that earnestness from wearing us out. She gives the romantic comedy a steadiness that allows the dialogue to be quick without every exchange becoming a contest for the cleverest line. There is pleasure in watching the two leads together because they let the lines do their work without pausing to invite our approval. Robert Warwick and William Demarest add to the bustle without making the smaller roles feel interchangeable.

John F. Seitz’s cinematography keeps the physical comedy readable and makes the poverty uncomfortable to look at. Stuart Gilmore’s editing is particularly good at managing the change from rapid dialogue to slapstick; the film can become boisterous without losing its bearings. The music credited to Leo Shuken and Charles Bradshaw is less memorable than the dialogue, but it supports those changes of pace effectively. At 91 minutes, there is room for both the talking and the action without either feeling rationed.

The reservation is that Preston Sturges sometimes makes Sullivan’s appetite for serious work sound foolish in itself. His film is right to mock a comfortable man’s confidence about understanding poverty. It is less persuasive when the jokes seem to dismiss the possibility that he could make a worthwhile serious film. That lets Hollywood off rather easily, and the writing is sharp enough elsewhere for us to expect more than a choice between laughter and a lecture.

Yet the film’s willingness to become uncomfortable keeps that objection from sinking it. The mood changes substantially, for reasons we will not describe, and the harder passages are allowed to hurt. As a Hollywood satire, it is unusually attentive to the people whom its central filmmaker wants to use as material. That attention matters: the poverty Sullivan has set out to investigate remains troubling even in a film with this much romance and slapstick.

We recommend it for an evening when a comedy sounds welcome but something entirely cosy does not. The dialogue rewards attention, so this is not one to leave chattering away while the conversation carries on elsewhere. Save the discussion about what films ought to do until afterwards; Sullivan is quite capable of filling the silence.