Finite Focus: Hey. Am I Laughing? (Sullivan’s Travels)
In my mind, if there is ever a scene from classic cinema that warms the cockles of my heart, it is this rendition of “Go Down Moses” near the end of Preston Sturges‘ Sullivan’s Travels. As for the film itself, it is a great meandering blend of slapstick, screwball comedy and social commentary. In other words, the kind of film that is simply not being made today outside of David O. Russell and The Coen Brothers (No Country for Old Men excepted). It’s an easy follow up to the previous Finite Focus on Miller’s Crossing, because Sturges in general, and Sullivan’s Travels in particular, play such a large part on informing the Coen’s films from The Lady Killers, Intolerable Cruelty to the most obvious one, O Brother Where Art Thou? which derives its title in direct reference to this film. While I’m on the subject, check out the framing in this scene and tell me you don’t think of at least 5 or 6 different Coen films.
The story follows Joel McCrea’s well-to-do director, Sully, who is getting tired and bored of making slapstick comedy pictures. He wants to adapt an ‘important’ novel on poverty called “O Brother Where Art Thou?” but his people, at first baffled, inform him that he doesn’t know anything about being poor because he has been rich all of his life. Sully then has several abortive and over-the-top bumbling attempts to ‘become poor’ (picking up the sexy Veronica Lake along the way). He finally does (accidentally) end up on (very) hard times through a extraordinarily convoluted series of events and is sent to a prison labour camp.
Cut to a church in the middle of a swamp and a sermon and an act of charity by letting the inmates watch a Disney cartoon. While Stanley Kubrick ends Full Metal Jacket on a note of bleak irony with Mickey Mouse, Sturges uses the comic pratfalls of Pluto to bind different social classes of the poor together in the bond of nearly hysterical laughter. Despite the somewhat disturbing intensity of the mirth at one point or another, it ends up making a convincing case for the value (and necessity) of silly comedies as an escape valve. That it takes place in a church is no coincidence, there is an honest to goodness reverence for the movies in this scene, bordering on holy vision. This is especially strange (yet still wonderful) to me in light of the mega-corp that Disney is today over what it was in 1941. And the message filtered down through the decades may very well be that Rob Schneider, Will Farrell and The Stooges should be pretty darn proud of themselves. In the end, “O Brother Where Art Thou?” is never made (well, actually it was in the year 2000 as a sepia tone, loopy and musical take on Homer and the deep south with a KKK rally envisioned as an homage to the Wizard of Oz, hardly the social-realist picture imagined by Sully, but funny in and of itself by far) Sully’s voyage of self-discovery lends credence to his earlier career having more value to a larger number of people than going all Oscar on his audience. (Aside: the Coen’s missed that point (or chose to ignore it) with their recent feature!) Sullivan’s Travels pulls a variety of tones and moods off in a nearly effortless seeming tight-rope walk; but it is a celebration of laughter as the universal cure-all and often the only one. Its heart is in the right place and the schmaltz is left at the door. I’d buy that for a dollar!
Comment by Mercurie — December 2, 2007
So, I admit it. I haven’t seen this yet. And it’s been near the top of my Must See List for a while. So sue me.
Comment by Jonathan — December 3, 2007
This is the first time I have seen Veronica Lake before and I think I am in love.
Comment by rot — June 1, 2008
Also, McCrea & Lake make a damn fine On Screen pairing.
Comment by Kurt — June 2, 2008
Next is Maltese Falcon another WWII film.
Had I the discipline I would like to watch films chronologically, like one or two of the best from each year and see how perceptions changed… at least until the sixties. Sullivan’s Travels feels very much of its time.
Comment by rot — June 2, 2008
(heh. How’s that for a revisionist take on a film…)
Comment by Kurt Halfyard — June 2, 2008
your take on the film is convenient to say the least. The film ends as sanctimonious on the point that any could… I just take it that for its time that moral made sense.
Comment by rot — June 2, 2008
Comment by Kurt — June 2, 2008
genre mash-ups theme:
Sullivan’s Travels and Night of the Hunter
but also you have to look at Great Silence some time… and so do I for that matter
Comment by rot — June 2, 2008
Comment by Rusty James — June 2, 2008
“The Great Silence”
“My Name Is Nobody”
“Sabata
“Adios”
“Return of Sabata”
“Django”
“Death Rides A Horse”
Comment by Kurt — June 2, 2008
Comment by Kurt — June 2, 2008