Sullivan's Travels

 Last night I watched Preston Sturges's classic comedy Sullivan's Travels (1941) – for the second time, but the first was quite some while ago. I had forgotten just what a captivating screen presence Veronica Lake was in her prime, and how brilliantly she performed with Joel McCrae here, despite the fact that he, like most others in the business, found her extremely difficult to work with. After Sullivan, McCrae refused to ever work with her again, and Sturges, it is said, had to be physically restrained when Lake sprang it on him, as filming began, that she was six months pregnant. This caused wardrobe some problems, but the film was in the can after just two months: Hollywood worked fast in those days, and spoke fast, and routinely brought films in at 90 tightly scripted and edited minutes. Veronica Lake's problems were mostly down to her growing addiction to alcohol, which was to finish her career prematurely and lead her to a sadly early death at just 50. None of this could be guessed from her sparkling, sexually alluring presence and spot-on performance in Sullivan's Travels. 
  The film takes its title from Gulliver's Travels, but as satire it is mild stuff, aimed only at Hollywood and its strange ways. In the end, in fact, Hollywood values triumph, when movie director Sullivan, having set out to experience the life of the poor and oppressed and make a social-realist epic dramatising the struggle between Capital and Labour, realises in the end that, as he says in the last lines of the film, 'There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that's all some people have? It isn't much, but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.' Which is exactly what his Hollywood bosses had been telling him all along as they tried to talk him out of his big ideas. 
  The film Sullivan wanted to make was going to be called O Brother, Where Art Thou? and we are left to imagine what a dreary conscience-wringer it would have been. When O Brother did take on existence it was nearly 60 years later, in the form of the Coen brothers' brilliant comedy with (great) music, set in rural Mississippi in the 1930s and featuring one of George Clooney's best performances. The film has some affinities with Sullivan's Travels, but the Coens' main inspiration was in fact Homer's Odyssey. So there you have it – an impressive genealogy: Homer and Swift ultimately yielding two brilliant Hollywood comedies.