Sullivan's Travels

Saw Sullivan's Travels, a sweet old black and white film from Preston Sturges. It follows a director who's trapped in the comedy genre when all he wants to do is make important message pictures. He decides to dress as a tramp at the height of the great depression and travel the country to see what's really going on. Almost immediately his proper, mincing butler delivers a searing indictment of the scheme. He warns that poverty is not ennobling or romantic, that people will not take kindly to his masquerade, that he may well be killed if he is discovered, and that he may well die anyway. Ignoring all of this, he first teams up with Veronica Lake (whose later life would render this casting eerily appropriate) and dives into the skiddiest of skid row. (A little aside about Veronica here, she has the greatest, iciest, femme-fatale-iest persona and delivery. I think it's supposed to be kind of a defence mechanism in this film, but it seems a lot more genuine than when she's giggling and kidding around later. Anyway...)

The film is a comedy however and the awful choking struggle of the homeless and destitute is never really given much room. The closest we get is a montage of crowded shelters and breadlines. It's pretty sad, but in the next moment we have a motor-mouthed Hollywood exec getting hilariously flustered, so we are mercifully distracted. Eventually the butler's prediction comes true and the director is mugged and left for dead. The mugger meets with justice, by the way, which annoyed me a great deal. Think how much more honest and cruel it would have been had he just capered off into the night with our hero's money and shoes. Anyway, stricken with amnesia, he beats up a rail worker and is sent to a prison colony where things get Cool Hand Luke-level shitty. He then, in a marvellous scene, has his revelation that what the poor really want and need is not more instruction and moralizing, but entertainment and laughter.

This message is extremely kind and indulgent. I bristle slightly at the indulgence and I feel compelled to point out that people are usually clever enough to not go to movies they won't like and that therefore you should make whatever you damn please, Mr director, but I have a hard time actually seriously objecting to it. Films with messages and philosophy are fun for those who want to learn something from a film and when I was younger (and not much younger either, I'm ashamed to say) I used to think that not wanting to learn from a film was tantamount to not wanting to learn at all. That to watch purely for entertainment was to waste time and to delude oneself. Eventually though, I gained the insight this film gives for free. There's nothing inherently wrong with wasting time or even self-deception. Yes these can be harmful in excess, but if you've had a hard day (or just any day,) why not switch off your analytical brain, settle down, and just believe that there's justice and simplicity in the world, just for a few hours? Why should everything be real and honest and trenchant and fraught? Ah, this may seem obvious to you, but to me this was a minor revelation. The protagonist delivers the film's central thesis beautifully but then ends it with "It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan." Ah, 1940s! Never change!