SIFF Hosts Sullivan's Travels in Great Depression

Wunderkind director Preston Sturges, screwball comedy king, made seven films between 1939 and 1943, which is a big deal except when you consider that four of them made it on AFI's Top 100 films list. Nice work, bub!

One of those four is Sullivan's Travels, which SIFF Cinema is showing in a new 35mm print. You've got a Tuesday and Thursday showing to choose from before the run ends.

The film has got that patented Sturges feel--snappy dialogue, great lines, a chase scene, and a deeply quirky cast of supporting characters. At the tail of the Great Depression, director John L. Sullivan (Joel McRea), who's never made a film of great import (though Ants in Your Pants of 1939 was very popular), becomes determined to get serious.

It'll be a high-minded statement--his source novel O Brother, Where Art Thou was written by one Upton Beckstein--so Sullivan wants to research it by walking among the poor and disenfranchised. After a few false starts, he gets his wish and more. There's also "a little sex," in the form of Veronica Lake. McRea and Lake both play it dialed down, and their chemistry is not blistering, but their meeting at a diner is pure meet-cute poetry. We liked Lake's performance actually; you don't get to know her very well, but that seemed right. She's seen enough trouble not to over-share. She knows better.

There's a lot of surprisingly "modern" talk about the ethics of Sullivan's enterprise which you can imagine floating around Ken Burns' office. Sturges wasn't above smacking a black chef with a cream pie--big yucks!--but Sullivan eventually arrives at a black church service, where the film's moral announces itself. We've seen a good deal of movies from the 1940s and earlier, but don't remember that many where the white guy was the abashed recipient of black charity. Hard to imagine how that scene played at the time.

Like the chase between the bus and the go-kart, the movie's need for gags can be a bumpy ride, but Sturges was right about one thing--real poverty makes you run the other way.