"Sullivan's Travels" (1941)

As I watched writer-director Preston Sturges comedy classic Sullivan's Travels, I was struck by how brilliantly the film skewers class privilege. It's a film about a man, film director John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), who has been so insulated from the struggles of working class Americans that he thinks it's an ingenious idea to set out on a roadtrip to find out how the other half lives. Anyone who has even had the tiniest taste of money-problems knows that it's not anything someone wants to willingly have to deal with. Yet Sullivan dives into the journey with the enthusiastic brio someone taking a trip to the Bahamas might express. He starts the journey unable to escape his publicist, producers and other members of his entourage, but even when he convinces them to let him do the trip on his own he keeps winding up right back in their company -- like some great cosmic joke on his silly and ultimately self-serving scheme. In time, Sullivan does learn a great deal about those less fortunate than himself, and suffers through terrible ordeals which finally cause him to wind up as a prisoner on a work-gang. The ending finds him crawling back into the cocoon of his privilege. His great lesson in all of it is not to make a drama based on his experiences but to scrap his knowledge in favor of making comedies to give the poor an nice escape from their difficult lives. It's a funny tail-end Depression Era film with Sullivan constantly out of his depth, or believing himself to be but really obliviously not. Though it tries to expose the trying-poverty of the working class, the film is so broad in its criticism that it hardly says anything other than "man, it sucks to be poor". The film is really better at the flipside of its engagement, revealing the limitations of those who have the money to affect large scale social change. They're really too ignorant of the situation they wish to fix to actually create meaningful change and reform.

Grade: ★★★