SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS (Sturges, 1941)
Criterion Collection, Blu-ray, Release Date April 14, 2015
Review by Christopher S. Long
John L Sullivan is a born fighter. The
Hollywood Strong Boy has already won the heavyweight box office belt
as the director of such lightweight comedies as “Ants in Your
Plants of 1939” and “Hey, Hey in The Hayloft” and now he's
battling risk-averse studio honchos for his dream project. “O
Brother Where Art Thou” will be a serious picture with symbolism
and real-world meaning, the kind of movie Depression-era audiences
really want. A (mostly) friendly executive suggests “Ants In Your
Plants of 1941” instead, but John L. Sullivan has picked his fight
and intends to go the distance.
Sullivan is portrayed by the steady,
inherently likeable Joel McCrea as an idealistic but naïve dreamer
(both a “bonehead” and a “genius” according to his peers) who
is stubborn and vain but is at least willing to accept a little
constructive criticism. Reminded that his privileged life has left
him short of the “real-world” knowledge he would need for his
magnum opus, he plans to acquire said knowledge by posing as a
drifter and hitting the road with just ten cents in his pocket.
That's about a penny for each of the members of his entourage who
trail him and help to provide one of the many parachutes he can
deploy whenever the going gets rough.
“Sullivan's Travels” (1941) was
writer-director Preston Sturges's most autobiographical feature.
Raised in privilege circumstances himself, Sturges was eager to
promote himself as more of an everyday Joe though his easy command of
sophisticated dialogue and his familiarity with the upper-crust
always made that a bit of a tough sell. Sullivan isn't precisely a
stand-in for Sturges, but he's not far removed from the real deal.
If Sullivan's sporadic explorations
teach him anything about poverty, it's that it is very cold.
Fortunately he can always press the rich man's panic button and get
warmed up whenever needed so any learning will be limited. If the
narrative has something else to teach Sullivan, it's that the
impoverished souls crowding America's trains and revival halls want
and need nothing more than a good laugh. No “deep-dish” movies
for an audience that hasn't even had lunch. A responsible “artiste”
will work to fill that need instead of selfishly following his own
ambitions.
If that was the entire premise of the
film, it would be pretty galling, populism at its most condescending
outside of a politician's campaign speech. It would also seem to be
an entirely inessential argument. Has there ever been a time when
Hollywood studios needed a slap on the hand to keep them from being
so ambitious and artsy and refusing to peddle formulaic escapist
fare?
But Sturges has a lot more on his mind
and certainly doesn't intend to suggest that the director become a
quiescent hack. “Sullivan's Travels” is indeed plenty artsy in
its own right and so serious at times it becomes downright grim. The
film shifts from screwball caper to a more serious register when
Sullivan hops his first train; the scene takes on an almost
documentary-like quality as the famous director playing at being a
bum muscles his way through a crowd, make that a huddled mass, of
itinerants gearing up for a desperate rush for a berth aboard a
moving train. The worn faces, the tattered clothes, the frantic surge
all speak to a deprivation so vast the silver screen can only catch
an oblique glimpse of it.
Accompanying Sullivan on this train
ride is a young woman dressed as a boy, but since the young woman is
played by Veronica Lake she isn't fooling anybody (although Sturges
and company fooled viewers by strategically hiding Lake's advancing
pregnancy). The unnamed girl showed Sullivan a little kindness when
he was hard up for a meal, the first of several times he encounters
spontaneous acts of generosity on a journey that brings him in
contact with considerable suffering and occasional peril, and now
she's tagging along with him ostensibly to keep him out of trouble.
Lake's peak was all-too-brief but here she is at her glorious peak
and she is, to dust off a film theory term, a real pill. And yes, of
course they'll wind up together; ain't you never seen a Hollywood
picture before?
While the film's superficial paean to
populism falls flat (at least for me), its tribute to the suffering
and the resiliency of disenfranchised workers in a land short on jobs
and overstuffed with exploiters rings true. Perhaps the most
memorable shot in the movie is a pan across the faces of worshipers
at a black church as a group of mostly-white prisoners (Sullivan
among them – it's a long story I won't spoil for you) files in to
the back so everyone can watch a Disney cartoon. The group's laugh is
the sound of solidarity which, at the very least, has the advantage
of being eminently affordable, and a little more plentiful when
facilitated by the right movie.
The ending is a bit too pat and
unconvincing (according to critic David Cairns on an extra on this
disc, Sturges was unsatisfied with it) but “Sullivan's Travels”
is a film so quintessentially of its time that it remains timeless.
When the bell finally rings, Sturges has won by a knockout.
Video:
Criterion originally released
“Sullivan's Travels” on SD in 2001 and I don't have it as a point
of comparison. This Blu-ray re-release maintains the old Spine Number
118 but comes with spiffy new cover art.
The film is presented in its original
1.37:1 aspect ratio. There are occasional signs of some minor dirt
and debris from the print source but we're talking specks rather than
chunks, nothing significant but not entirely pristine. I think that's
perfectly acceptable for a 70+ year-old film. Black-and-white
contrast is rich with a thick grain structure throughout and only the
occasional bit of softness suggesting some clean-up boosting. This
high-def transfer looks very good overall.
Audio:
The linear PCM mono track is crisp and
efficient as we've come to expect from Criterion's single-channel
presentations. No damage or distortion is audible. The score by Leo
Shuken and Charles Bradshaw is treated pretty well by this lossless
audio. Optional English subtitles support the English audio.
Extras:
Criterion has imported the extras from
the 2001 SD release and added one more.
The new one is a great visual essay
(2014, 17 min.) written and directed by critic David Cairns and
titled “Ants In Your Plants of 1941,” a playful suggestion that
it's a kissing cousin to the next film the rehabilitated Sullivan is
going to make. This essay features narration by director Bill Forsyth
(of “Local Hero” fame) who is a big fan of the film. Forsyth and
Cairns (in voice-over) trade off observations about the film; one new
tidbit I picked up was that Sturges loosely based Sullivan's travels
on real excursions by directors John Huston and William Wyler. Cairns
admires the film while also noting that, like every other movie, it's
not perfect.
The other features are repeats from the
2001 release, including the commentary by filmmakers Noah Baumbach,
Kenneth Bowser and Christopher Guest and Michael McKean. They like
the movie a little bit.
“Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall
of An American Dreamer” (75 min.) is an Emmy-award winning
documentary directed by Kenneth Bowser and written by Todd McCarthy
which aired in 1990 on PBS's “American Masters” series. It takes
a pretty conventional approach to the writer-director's career but
provides quite a bit of information in an entertaining, accessible
manner.
The disc also includes a 2001 interview
(13 min.) with Sandy Sturges, wife of the writer-director.
And we also get three Archival Audio
clips: Sturges talking to Hedda Hopper (4 min., from a Jan 28, 1951
broadcast of “Hedda Hopper on Hollywood”), Sturges reciting the
poem “If I Were A King” (1 min.) and Sturges singing “My Love”
(1938, 1 min, 37 sec.), one of many songs he composed.
The slim fold-out booklet features an
essay by critic Stuart Klawans.
Final Thoughts:
I used to hold the extreme populist
premise of “Sullivan's Travels” against it, but I have since come
to embrace its many obvious strengths instead. This high-def upgrade
from Criterion only adds one new extra but it's a good one and the
sharp new transfer is a strong one. Recommended, of course.
