This blog was begun last night (Monday August 5 2019) and completed just now :
Tonight we were hanging out once again with our pal Preston Sturges, who directed this evening's movie : "Sullivan's Travels" (1941), starring Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake. The film opens with McCrea, a successful motion picture director, screening his latest work for a group of studio executives. It looks exciting, but the execs are not thrilled. McCrea has made his name on fluffy comedies. This time he has given the producers a "message" picture, about how the of evils of capitalism have resulted in the Depression and their response is predictable : "But will it play in Pittsburgh"?
Of course it won't play in Pittsburgh, nor most likely in any place except New York and Los Angeles, where all the Commies live, haha. McCrea has messed with the formula, it's bad for box-office and the executives don't want to release his movie. "Why would you want to make such a picture"?, they ask him. "What do you know about trouble"? McCrea was brought up in a wealthy family; the executives all claim to come from hard scrabble backgrounds. The Great Depression is still affecting a wide swath of the population, war is raging in Europe and on the horizon for America. What indeed does McCrea know of trouble? He should stick to what he does best, which is to put people in the seats and make them laugh.
But McCrea has clout with the studio, so the executives still have to placate him. When he announces his plan to "find out what trouble is", they are horrified, because he wants to dress as an anonymous hobo and venture out alone, hopping trains on a cross-country information gathering trip, to find out what it's like to live in poverty in America. Maybe when he returns, the producers will take him seriously in his desire to make meaningful pictures. But this is a Preston Sturges film, so nothing - and certainly no plot line - is going to be as simple as it may seem.
McCrea forces the hand of the executives by stating that he'll just as soon walk away from his next movie if they don't allow him to take his road trip, so they reluctantly agree, with one proviso : he has to agree to let a group of studio lackeys follow him on his travels. They will be in a motor home, armed with cameras to document him from afar and generally keep an eye on him. The motive is money. He is worth a fortune to the studio so they have to protect their investment, even if he has gone a little crazy in the head by wanting to Make A Big Statement with his next film.
So McCrea sets out, dressed in rags and deliberately carrying only a dime in his pocket. He hops his first train with some difficulty, rides down the tracks a way during the night, and then jumps off, only to discover that he's made a round trip. He's back on the outskirts of Hollywood, and actually - this is me taking now - he is back in the San Fernando Valley, and it is amazing to see the location shots from back in 1941. Canoga Park was one big fruit orchard. Boulevards that are now wide with congested traffic were, at that time, two lane blacktops with no stores in sight but only trees on the side of the road. Oh, to have lived here then. And, I sort of got to do that, because I was born into the Valley in 1960, at the tail end of it's rural existence, which would continue, in diminishing proportions, for another dozen years. We Valley Old Timers are farmers at heart, I certainly am, so I get excited anytime I see footage of the way things were.
But back to the story, McCrea awakes in a boxcar to find himself not out of state, not cross country, but near to where he started, so he jumps off and makes his way to the nearest diner. He is hungry, but has only the thin dime in his pocket, just enough for a hot cup of coffee.
Luckily for him, there is a nice lady in the diner in the person of Veronica Lake. She sees that he is down and out (even though he really isn't), and offers to buy him ham and eggs. She is on the road herself, a would-be actress who has tried and failed to make it big in Hollywood. Now she has had enough, and is headed back east to her hometown. Little does she know that she is talking to one of the biggest directors in the business, in disguise as a hobo to further his career and become an artiste.
McCrea takes a liking to her, one thing leads to another, and soon his story crumbles. Lake, as it turns out, really is poor, and she has just spent her last 35 cents buying him breakfast. He feels an obligation to help her out, so he concocts a story about "borrowing a friend's car" to drive her to the bus station, except that the "friend's car" is really his own, a luxury auto and she can sense that she is being played in some unclear way. McCrea can't hold up under her scrutiny, so he admits who he is, and drives the both of them back to his mansion, where he plans all over again to set out on the road, to complete his original mission.
Only this time, Veronica Lake has taken a shine to him and wants to come along. She is only 19 (in real life, too, and in her first starring role) and she is not about to take no for an answer. The sequence at the mansion involves some great Preston Sturges comedy, including a lengthy pool scene that begins with Lake pushing McCrea into the water, fully clothed of course, and ultimately brings the household's two stuffy butlers into the act. This is the kind of comedy Sturges excelled at, and put a personal stamp on as well.
"Sullivan's Travels", though, is by no means the maniacal Screwball Fest we are used to from Sturges, that we got, say, in the recently reviewed "The Lady Eve", or to an even greater extent in "The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek", one of the nuttiest movies we've ever seen. "Sullivan" has light comedy filtering through it's dialogue and staging almost from start to finish, but the foundation, the context of the film is very serious. Sturges, perhaps stepping for himself in McCrea's director character, wants to really examine how the extremely poor are living in America at that time, and as McCrea and Lake set off on the real journey this time, he shows them riding trains and crashing in flophouses with what looks like roomfuls of real hobos. Now McCrea is getting a taste of what trouble is like and he and Lake scrounge food from garbage cans. At the same time, he is also getting material for his movie, and a romance is blossoming between him and Lake, mostly from her youthful insistence. It must be said here that Veronica Lake was a real talent, much more than just a beautiful woman with a peek-a-boo haircut. She was a natural at comedy, and could play the tough dames of film noir just as well. Unfortunately, as we have all too often seen, she had a short and difficult life, but her work has stood the test of time and she is just great in this movie, perfectly paired with Joel McCrea, himself a good actor and major movie star who was one of the most likable screen presences of the Golden Era.
"Sullivan's Travels" will take, in it's last half hour, a turn so out of left field that I can't reveal any more of the story to you. All I can say is that, as this third act was playing out, I came to realise that Preston Sturges was not only a comedic genius but was also one of the greatest American film directors who ever lived. Therefore, I am giving the movie my highest honor, Two Gigantic Thumbs Up, and my ultimate recommendation to make sure you see it as soon as possible. There aren't the same endless laughs that you get in other Sturges movies, but what you get instead is a monumental work of art, from the heart, and the comedy is still there, too. See it, see it, see it. /////
This is me again, writing to ya on Tuesday Afternoon (Moody Blues, get it?). I am running late on my blogs again, even though I keep promising not to. Right now I'm gonna head to the Libe to pick up more movies, then back to Pearl's. But I'll be back here at The Blog tonight, at the Usual Time, and once again I'll make every effort to finish before I fall asleep, lol.
See you tonight. Tons of love in the meantime. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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