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"The bus arrived in Hollywood. In the gray, dirty dawn, like the dawn when Joel McCrea met Veronica Lake in a diner, in the picture 'Sullivan's Travels.'"
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road
I'd like to think that passage from Kerouac had the same effect on other readers that it had on me. At the time I first read the book, I'd never heard of Sullivan's Travels, but something in the atmosphere of that early morning moment made me want to see it. The chances of tracking down an old movie were slim in those days, before there were such wonders as videos, VCRs, and DVDs.
In 2007, it's easy. You can walk into the Princeton Public Library and check out Sullivan's Travels in two different DVD editions, preferably the one from Criterion, which includes a group commentary featuring Christopher Guest and Michael McKeon (Spinal Tap meets Preston Sturges), storyboards, set blueprints, and an interview with the director's fourth and last wife.
The first time I saw the movie was on the Late Show or maybe The Late Late Show, a program New Yorkers of a certain age will remember well enough to be able to whistle or hum the theme music, Leroy Anderson's "The Syncopated Clock." Of course you had to put up with commercials the film had probably been violated to make room for, and it wasn't fun having to twist the rabbit-ears antennae in pursuit of a reasonably stable image on your puny 11-inch screen. Not that I'm a purist or hardship boaster or that I mean to knock the technical and informational advantages of DVDs. It's nice to be in control and to have all those resources at your fingertips. But there was a special sort of excitement in the days when a piece of 1941 movie America as stirring as Sullivan's Travels would surface on TV at some ungodly hour, as if tossed your way by the hand of fate.
There's a real difference between something you control and something that happens to you, between state-of-the-art viewing pleasure and the charge of an actual experience. The virtue of experience is, in fact, one of the themes explored in Sturges's odyssey. His Odysseus is John L. Sullivan (played by Joel McCrea), a successful, well-born director of popular musical comedies with silly names like Hey Hey in the Hayloft. Sullivan has made up his mind to change course and direct a serious, socially conscious movie about "the poor and needy" and the grim realities of Depression Era America. He plans to call it O Brother Where Art Thou (a title borrowed by the Coen brothers in 2000 for their Odysseyan exploration of the same time period). The pampered reality of Sullivan's lot is amusingly obvious when we see a valet helping him into his tramp outfit (from the studio's wardrobe department) prior to the first of several thwarted ventures out of Beverly Hills into the real world. After being asked his opinion of his boss's tramp regalia, Sullivan's magisterial butler delivers an eloquent warning that contains one of the lessons of this message movie about the folly of making message movies:
"I've never been sympathetic to the caricaturing of the poor and needy, sir," says the butler. "The subject is not an interesting one. The poor know all about poverty and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamorous …. You see, sir, rich people and theorists think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches — as disease might be called the lack of health. But it isn't, sir. 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."
The comic chemistry of such rhetoric coming from the mouth of a servant —as if one's chauffeur suddenly began speaking like Henry James — accomplishes in one neat motion what the whole movie does: it uses a light, deft touch to deliver a heavy message.
Sullivan's Travels is dedicated "to the memory of those who made us laugh … whose efforts have lightened our burden a little." What makes this a great film, for a start, is that the director wrote it (Sturges wrote and directed all his films) and was able to blend romance, melodrama, and comedy without compromising the humanity of his central characters, as sometimes happens when his pursuit of the Big Laugh leads him astray. In his other pictures laughter was the objective; in Sullivan's Travels it is the subject, theme, and cause. In films like The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero, he goes after his objective with a vengeance, mercilessly skewering norms, myths, ideals, and values in the process. When he takes comedy to excess, or when it takes him, it's the filmic equivalent of purple prose or bombast. He can't seem to help himself. If there's a banana peel on the premises in one of his movies, you can bet someone's going to slip on it and when they do, it won't be a pedestrian tumble: it will be a pratfall Nijinsky might have admired. Whenever people get near a swimming pool in a Sturges movie, you know someone's going to fall or be pushed in, which can happen one time too many even in Sullivan's Travels.
A Wild Ride
The truth is, Preston Sturge's greatest movie also happens to contain his most excessive display of comic overkill. But then it makes sense that a film about the power of laughter would contain the ultimate example of this director's pursuit of the Big Laugh. In the context of his work, the chase sequence in Sullivan's Travels is as defining a piece of directing and editing as the shower sequence in Psycho is in the context of Hitchcock's. Besides being one of the most brilliantly choreographed and edited slapstick atrocities ever committed to film, it has a racist and sexist arrogance that would come off as grossly gratuitous in a lesser work.
It happens at the outset of Sullivan's first attempt to see how the other half lives. He's on the road, his staff and bundle slung over his shoulder. Following protectively along mere yards behind him is a small bus that contains all the conveniences, including a fully stocked kitchen with a black chef who has just set the table and is about to serve breakfast. Also along for the ride and waiting for breakfast are Sullivan's personal physician and a gruff overseer from the studio's front office, not to mention a radio operator with a short-wave set-up; in the front seat you have a photographer, a driver with the face and voice of a prizefighter and the rhetoric of an English professor, and a press agent who is dictating the story of Sullivan's adventure to a pretty secretary, intoning "Thus begins this remarkable expedition into the valley of the shadow of adversity —."
Sullivan's way of dealing with the situation is to flag down the first vehicle that comes along, a homemade-looking racing car driven by a 13-year-old who warns Sullivan that he "drives fast," which is just what Sullivan wants. By climbing in and urging the kid to "go to it" and take sharp, sudden turns (the homemade speedometer goes up to 125 mph), he effectively sets in motion the elaborate scene of carnage in the bus; you could even say he's directing it. As the William Tell Overture explodes on the soundtrack and the bus jolts forward and roars into the chase, everything and everyone in the mobile entourage is turned upside down. It's pure visual cacophony. Bodies topple, objects fly every which way, the occupants in front being tossed about like clothes in a dryer gone beserk, the secretary on her back, kicking her long legs in a kind of soft-core pin-up-girl ecstasy (if you slow the film on your DVD player, you can see that she's laughing as much as she's screaming) while the black cook is pelted with everything in the kitchen (he had a tray of eggs in one hand as the bus sped up) and, in an outrageous piece of cartoon dynamics, is eventually forced headfirst through the roof of the bus, his chef-hatted face poking through the top, his feet kicking. When the nightmare is over and the eggs and batter equivalent of custard pie have stopped flying, the cook is in white face, a crude reversal of minstrel black-face. It's a testament to the quality of the movie that it transcends such vulgarity. From what we know, Sturges was not a racist, just a flagrantly amoral filmmaker who knew no shame in the pursuit of laughter.
It's possible that the human cartoon inside the discombobulated bus was conceived of as a sort of companion piece to the scene that makes the film's definitive statement — the moment when Sullivan himself experiences the healing power of laughter with his fellow prisoners (his quest for "experience" having landed him on a real-life chain gang) while watching a Walt Disney cartoon wherein poor Pluto endures a slapstick nightmare with a piece of flypaper.
Excess notwithstanding, Sullivan's Travels is one of the great American movies because Sturges has it both ways. He not only delivers the film Sullivan wants to direct, he makes it work as art and entertainment. He takes low comedy to the limit and gets away with it; he creates a touching romance with the hobo duo of McCrea and Lake, who has to pass herself off as a boy (fat chance), her trademark peek-a-boo hair tucked under a cap. At the same time, he manages to suggest the deepening of their relationship by moving them through a long, somber, feelingly edited sequence (some seven minutes without a word of dialogue), silently documenting their shared witnessing of scenes along the road, in railroad yards, Salvation Army missions, community showers, and soup kitchens.
The Owl Wagon
But I haven't mentioned my favorite scene, which is the dawn moment cited in On the Road when the would-be tramp returns to Hollywood from one of his failed expeditions into reality. After watching the truck that has just dropped him off drive away, he goes into the all-night diner called an owl wagon, asks for some coffee and a doughnut, and is seen by a girl with long, silky, peek-a-boo hair who is on her way back to the heartland after a shot at Hollywood fame and fortune. She's just bought a pack of cigarettes from a cigarette machine. Thinking the tramp asking for coffee is just what he seems to be, she tells the counter man, "Give him some ham and eggs" and comes over and offers him a cigarette. The dialogue between the two is as good as something out of early Hemingway, the nuances are just right — you can almost smell the coffee. "Things are tough everywhere," Sullivan says, thinking about his mission, maybe hoping to start a conversation he can use in the film. "War in Europe. Strikes over here. No work, no food."
"Drink your coffee while it's hot," she says.