Next to The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels might be Preston Sturges's most widely known film; personally, I count it as my favorite among his work, in large part because it seamlessly unites several films, or threads, in one: a hilarious comedy about making movies, a satire about Hollywood's incessant emphasis on lowbrow entertainment, a critique of the bloated thought that would dismiss entertainment outright, and a commentary on hope amidst destitution. In the middle of the Great Depression and the Second World War, John Sullivan (Joel McCrea), a film director whose claim to fame includes such throwaway features as Ants in Your Pants of 1939, decides he wants to make films about "the suffering of humanity," and so he leaves his swanky upper-class settings to hit the road as a hobo and get in touch with the common man. Along the way, he meets Veronica Lake's sultry would-be actress, and the comedy ensues. As with other features, Sturges jammed Sullivan's Travels with extended sequences of witty, back-and-forth dialog, with vibrant, volleyed exchanges between McCrea and Lake and between the two and various minor characters. The film's first half focuses on Sullivan's antics, on his efforts to elude the studio lackeys who trail him, and on his hapless journeys across the country with Lake in tow. She's disguised as a young man, which obviously doesn't work; "you look about as much like a boy as Mae West", Sullivan tells her. Interestingly, though, just as Sullivan wants to make a film with social meaning, Sullivan's Travels becomes exactly that, a darker, less buoyant, more serious work, and the abrupt tonal shift evolves into a surprising, but effective, extended moment of verbal silence: a mournful, dialog-free montage of migrant workers sleeping in a shelter, attending a fire-and-brimstone sermon at a church, and eating in a soup kitchen. For a film structured so tightly around spoken dialog, Sturges's decision to abandon words altogether during the film's most earnest and socially significant moment is an exercise in real eloquence, as well as an act embodying Sullivan's belief in the redemptive and educational possibilities of cinema. Silence is not so much a lack of language here, but a language in its own right.
Still, I have to hand it to Sturges; the dialog is the main treat:
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