Sullivan's Travels (1941)

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

In writer/director Preston Sturges' brilliant screwball comedy and satire about Hollywood movie-making, with added social commentary about class divisions:

• butler Burrows (Robert Greig) delivered a speech about the 'realities' of poverty to Hollywood director John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), who had become tired and disgusted with making escapist comedies: ("Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned")
• comedy-film director Sullivan decided to learn about poverty and misery firsthand; he dressed up as a 'hobo' to 'travel' the country so he could use his acquired socially-meaningful insights from the common folk for his next dramatic film
• in a classic comedic chase scene with old-style slapstick, the studio's entourage (a land-yacht) trailed Sullivan in order to observe and protect him
• Sullivan met and paired up with a job-seeking, would-be, disenchanted and nameless starlet known as The Girl (Veronica Lake) in an all-night, roadside diner
• The Girl, dressed as a male hobo, wandered and toured with Sullivan (also dressed as a hobo) across America to both experience poverty (and the underside of life) for themselves
• in a case of mistaken identity (his stolen shoes ended up on the feet of a bum who was hit and killed by a train), Sullivan ended up in a real predicament when he accused of an assault on a rail-employee in a train yard
• imprisoned in a prison work farm for a term of six years of hard labor, the presumed-dead and incarcerated Sullivan was brought to a black church one night to watch a screening of a 1934 Pluto/Mickey Mouse cartoon (Playful Pluto) on a flimsy white sheet - he laughed along with his fellow, hardened Georgia chain-gang prisoners at the crazy antics when Pluto became stuck on flypaper and attempted to extricate himself but became even more entangled - a relevant image for Sullivan's own situation; he rhetorically asked himself: "Hey, am I laughing?" then suddenly realized that humorous movies, like religion, were the therapeutic solution to the pain of poverty or to the enmity between races
• to escape from the prison farm, Sullivan made a false confession to his own murder, in order to be recognized in pictures printed in newspapers - the ploy worked; his studio and friends realized he was still alive
• back in Hollywood, Sullivan was inspired to return to making film comedies: ("There's a lot to be said for making people laugh! Did you know that's all some people have? It isn't much but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan! Boy!")