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Movie Review - Sullivan's Travels (1941)
June 27, 2024
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“How does the girl fit in this picture?”

“There’s always a girl in the picture. Haven’t you ever been to the movies?”

Before everything was meta, Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels was meta. It’s the story of director John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) who is tired of making goofy movies and wants to make O Brother, Where Art Thou? and “hold a mirror up to life.” Life in 1941 wasn’t all Mickey Mouse cartoons, after all. Sullivan feels that what’s really needed is “A true canvas of the suffering of humanity!” Of course, what does a hotshot Hollywood director know of suffering? Nothing. Everyone in his circle tells him that, and tries to tell him that audiences want to laugh, to escape their suffering.

So in his movie, Sturges does both.

The first act features a zany chase, with Sullivan in a kid’s homemade go-kart as they try to escape his entourage in a motorhome. People are bouncing off the walls, getting covered in food, popping through the roof, and a lady shows a lot of leg. It’s practically a cartoon. He eventually ends up in a boardinghouse run by an old lady who wants to seduce him, and ultimately ends up right back where he started in Hollywood. Undeterred, he goes back out into the world dressed as bum straight out of central casting.

Then he meets The Girl. Because there’s always a girl in the picture.

The Girl (Veronica Lake) doesn’t have any other name. Again, meta. Sullivan’s Travels is a movie within a movie, but none of the characters are in on it. We aren’t really supposed to notice either. The Girl, though younger, is more worldly wise than Sullivan. She moved to Hollywood to become a star, and now that she’s run out of money, is heading home. Lake, of course, is drop-dead gorgeous and delivers her lines with acerbic wit. Immediately taken with her and without giving away his act, Sullivan tries to convince her to stay until his ruse has ended. 

It backfires and they end up getting arrested for stealing his own luxury sedan. 

Once the cat is out of the bag, The Girl insists on going with him. This time, without his own press crew and doctor, to give Sullivan an authentic taste of life in the real world. The scenes play out in montage (one of several), surprising for such a wordsmith as Sturges, and yet the perfect choice. When Sullivan and The Girl reach their limit and call an end to the experiment, we might think that the movie is over and his arc completed. And we would be wrong.

Sullivan’s Travels is structured as a mirror image of itself. 

I could write an entire essay on how it does this. Suffice to say, the madcap comedy of the first half reverses itself and becomes very dark in the second. Story elements are deliberately called back to, and not in ways so obvious that everyone will catch them on a first viewing. As clever as Sturges was he never felt the need to highlight that at the expense of the audience’s enjoyment. More than that, while he had a message that he wanted to make explicitly clear, he holds off until the very end. 

“There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”

I used to be uncomfortable with this movie, wondering if the argument is for art for art’s sake. Now I realize that Sturges is arguing for anything but. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Sullivan’s movie, not the Cohen Brothers’) was the self-indulgent, look how edgy and artsy and wise I am, art piece Sturges was advocating against. Sullivan’s Travels is art, not for its own sake, but to offer perspective to storytellers and joy to the masses. 

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Alien (1979) Movie Review

It'd been about 20 years since I last saw Alien, and then it was only because a roommate demanded it of me. I've never gone further into the franchise.

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Why Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rope' is More Relevant Now than Ever

When I first saw Rope, as a young college student, I didn't really appreciate it. Sure, the illusion of the 82 minute continuous shot was impressive. Watching the "perfect" murder fall in on itself was satisfying. But now, having lived some life, and especially in light of recent events, Rope is more poignant than ever.

Rope was Hitchcock's first color film and is based on a play, which was in turn inspired by actual events. Two gay men attempt to commit the perfect murder, and then ghoulishly host a dinner party at the scene of the crime, going so far as to serve the meal on the trunk in which the body is hidden.

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If you haven't seen Rope, or not seen it recently, it's worth watching now.

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F1 is Modern Western

As a nation, the United States is unique. We don’t share a genetic heritage, but a creed. Americans and our ideas come from all over the world. But we’re at our best when take those outside ideas and make them our own. Everything we have came from another culture, but there was a time when we could take things and collectively make them better.

Democracy? Check. Rock’n’roll? Check. Heck! Chinese food? Yes, we did.

Don’t hate. You know I’m right.

One of the greatest art forms we’ve given the world is the western genre. While rooted in courtly romances of King Arthur, we took the idea of the man on horseback who makes things right on his quest for something spiritual and made it distinctly American. Most of the time, these stories aren’t historically accurate, but that’s not the point. They’re soaked in the American ethos. For better or for worse, the western has become the American myth, even more so than 1776.

And the cool thing about myths is that you can take them and tell other stories. 

Star Trek (and later Firefly) took the western to space. 

A few weeks ago I was able to see F1: The Movie on IMAX, and I had high hopes. Director Joseph Krasinski had proved himself with Top Gun: Maverick, which is about as American as a modern movie can get. But mostly, I just wanted to see if he could do with racecars what he’d done with fighter jets. In that regard, I was everything I’d hoped it would be. The idea of Americanism didn’t even cross my mind, since F1 is primarily a European sport.

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Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes with all the careless cool of Paul Newman in his prime and a Steve McQueen swagger. While Pitt has never played a cowboy and isn’t a racecar driver in real life, Newman and McQueen played both, and did both. Hayes has been keeping himself busy with no-name races since an F1 crash nearly killed him some 30 years before. But when Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), an old friend and rival, needs some wins to save the team, he tracks down Sonny.

And the old dog knows a few tricks.

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It’s spelled out in the trailer, but it didn’t strike me until the very end.

Kate calls Sonny Hayes an “old school rough and tumble cowboy” in a line used in the marketing. When he arrives in the garage, only Ruben knows him. Sonny is the stranger in town. Like James Garner in Support Your Local Sheriff, his method of restoring order and winning is unorthodox and effective. Like Shane, in that Alan Ladd classic, he’s guarded about his past. And like John Wayne in The Searchers and so many other westerns, Sonny Hayes is the outsider who must leave civilization once he’s made it civilized for those who belong there.

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Perhaps the hardboiled crime story, another uniquely American genre, is also an outgrowth of the western. Philip Marlow is the man who must walk down mean streets, who is not himself mean. As Raymond Chandler said, “He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.” Basically, the man he’s describing is dangerous, but not cruel. Dispassionate in taking revenge, and restrained by a code of honor.

But destined to be lonely, nonetheless.

Why we’ve made that an essential part of the American is a topic for another time. But there it is. And it’s the story of Sonny Hayes. At the end of the movie [SPOILER], he rides off into the sunset as the credits roll. The western isn’t dead. It’s still there, in essence, speaking to our hearts in different ways.

Nothing more American than that. 

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