The title was a nod to Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels, which people in 1941 probably understood, because people in 1941 read books. But Sullivan’s Travels isn’t a parody of the book — it’s a parody of Hollywood’s self-importance, and a cracking good comedy to boot. Why is it still cited among the best laffers in movie history? Let’s pick up our hobo bindles and investigate.

The Praise

Sullivan’s Travels appears on the American Film Institute’s 2007 list of the 100 best movies ever made (#61), as well as the list of greatest comedies (#39). In 1990, it was chosen for inclusion in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” Film critic Todd McCarthy called it “the sweetest, most generous-hearted satire of the Hollywood film industry the town has ever produced.”

The Context

Though “writer” and “director” are two very different jobs in Hollywood, there have always been people who did both, from D.W. Griffith in the beginning to Wes Anderson today. But the first person to establish a successful career as a screenwriter first, before gaining the clout to start directing his own movies, was Preston Sturges (1898-1959).

The prolific Chicago-born Sturges struck it big as a Broadway playwright in the late 1920s and was quickly snatched up by Hollywood. There he worked on various studios’ screenplays for only a few years before selling his own original script, The Power and the Glory (1933), to Fox. For the rest of the decade he was paid handsomely to write numerous screenplays — 17 in all, often as part of a team (as was common), sometimes without an onscreen credit. Frustrated by the lack of control over his own dialogue, he offered Paramount an original screenplay called The Great McGinty (1940) for free if they’d let him direct it. (Well, technically, he put a price of one dollar on the screenplay. Paramount’s lawyers upped it to ten.) The studio went for it; the film did well, and it earned Sturges an Oscar for best original screenplay.

Having established himself as a double threat (albeit one who was much more praised for his wordsmithing than his directing), and thrilled to have finally gotten the creative control he’d always wanted, Sturges enthusiastically went to work. He wrote and directed an astonishing seven more films in the next four years. Two of the three movies he released in 1944 — The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero — were nominated for best screenplay Oscars.

It was in the middle of this hot streak that he made Sullivan’s Travels, which probably competes with The Lady Eve (released nine months earlier) for the distinction of being his most famous work. Now abundantly well-established as a purveyor of mirth and merriment, he went a little meta on us and told the story of a film director who’s tired of making comedies and wants to do something “important.” But Sturges let us know up front that the character would eventually change his mind, starting the film with this inscription: “To the memory of those who made us laugh: the motley mountebanks, the clowns, the buffoons, in all times and in all nations, whose efforts have lightened our burden a little, this picture is affectionately dedicated.”

The Movie

A successful Hollywood director named John Lloyd Sullivan (Joel McCrea) wants to move away from the light comedies that have marked his career so far and make something about the stark realities of America’s poor and downtrodden. When it is pointed out that Sullivan has led a privileged life and knows nothing of poverty, he disguises himself as a hobo and sets out to learn firsthand about suffering.

What it Influenced

In an amusing quirk of fate, the most enduring legacy of Sullivan’s Travels in pop culture has been not the movie itself, but the movie that its main character wants to make, a socially conscious drama called O Brother, Where Art Thou?. That title looms large in the canon of fake movie titles, like Stab (from the Scream movies), Gandhi 2 (from UHF), See You Next Wednesday (a recurring gag in John Landis’ films), and Simple Jack (Ben Stiller’s “full retard” movie in Tropic Thunder).

A second-season episode of The Simpsons borrowed the title for a story about Homer’s long-lost brother (voiced by Danny DeVito), an auto magnate who ends up penniless thanks to Homer’s interference. The Samuel L. Jackson/Nicolas Cage comedy Amos & Andrew (1993) has Jackson’s character writing a play and movie called Yo, Brother, Where Art Thou?.

And of course Joel and Ethan Coen actually made a film called O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), starring George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson as chain-gang escapees during the Great Depression. The film’s plot was loosely based on The Odyssey (by the non-Simpson Homer) but borrowed several elements from Sullivan’s Travels. The Coens said their movie was more or less what they thought Sullivan would have come up with if he’d actually gone through with it.

That wasn’t the first time the Coens had referenced Sullivan’s Travels, nor would it be the last. In Barton Fink (1991), the title character is a screenwriter who, like Sullivan, wants to tell a story about the “common man.” Then, in The Ladykillers (2004), the Coens borrowed the sight gag of a portrait changing facial expressions.

The theme of a filmmaker wanting to abandon his frivolous ways and make something significant also appears in Grand Canyon (1991), with Steve Martin’s character (who is advised by Kevin Kline to watch Sullivan’s Travels for guidance), and in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980). Allen also paid homage in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), with his character’s spirits being revived upon seeing a Marx Brothers comedy just like Sullivan’s are when he sees a Disney cartoon.

And while we can’t attribute it to Sullivan’s Travels specifically, Preston Sturges’ winning streak during this time paved the way for other screenwriters to strike similar deals wherein they would direct their own work, including Billy Wilder and John Huston.

What to look for: The movie’s first scene, in which Sullivan argues with studio executives about what type of picture he should make next, is a rapid-fire gem of Hollywood satire. (You can watch it here.) Sullivan has just shown two studio heads a movie that he says is representative of the kind of thing he’d like to make. He’s very worked up about it:

SULLIVAN: You see the symbolism of it? Capital and labor destroy each other! It teaches a lesson, a moral lesson, it has social significance!
HADRIAN: Who wants to see that kind of stuff? It gives me the creeps.
SULLIVAN: Tell him how long it played in the Music Hall.
LEBRAND: It was held over a fifth week.
HADRIAN: Who goes to the Music Hall? Communists!
SULLIVAN: Communists?! This picture is an answer to Communists! It shows we’re awake and not dunking our heads in the sand like a bunch of ostriches! I want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions, stark realism, the problems that confront the average man.
LEBRAND: But with a little sex.
SULLIVAN: A little, but I don’t want to stress it. I want this picture to be a document. I want to hold a mirror up to life. I want this to be a picture of dignity — a true canvas of the suffering of humanity.
LEBRAND: But with a little sex.
SULLIVAN: With a little sex in it.
HADRIAN: How about a nice musical?
SULLIVAN: How can you talk about musicals at a time like this? With the world committing suicide, with corpses piling up in the street, with grim death gargling at you from every corner, with people slaughtered like sheep?
HADRIAN: Maybe they’d like to forget that.
SULLIVAN: Then why did they hold this one over for a fifth week at the Music Hall? For the ushers?
HADRIAN: It died in Pittsburgh.
LEBRAND: Like a dog.
SULLIVAN: What do they know in Pittsburgh?
LEBRAND: They know what they like.
SULLIVAN: If they knew what they liked, they wouldn’t live in Pittsburgh.

Zing! And that’s only the beginning. The rest of the conversation, with slight modification to the details, could just as easily take place in Hollywood today — and probably does, in fact, on a regular basis. Should you give the audience what they say they want, or what you think they need? If you pander to the audience, you get stuck making garbage. But you know what else you make? Lots of money.

As examples of the lowest-common-denominator mentality that Sullivan says he’s tired of, he mentions the Keystone Kops chases, “bathing beauties,” and pie-in-the-face gags. Sullivan’s Travels eventually uses all of these devices, and uses them well. So is the movie satirizing Sullivan’s notion that Hollywood should do anything other than cater to moviegoers’ broad tastes? Isn’t Sullivan’s Travels the kind of movie that Sullivan was railing against?

Not so fast. Because Sullivan’s Travels also has the stark social commentary and depiction of tragedy that Sullivan wanted to explore. The montage of poverty in America circa 1940 is sobering and fairly realistic. Sullivan isn’t exactly an avatar for Preston Sturges — for one thing, Sturges was famous for being a writer and director, while Sullivan is clearly just a director-for-hire — but you can see how Sturges would have felt personally vindicated when his movie managed to achieve comedy and pathos all at once.

It was especially a triumph given his motivation for doing the film in the first place. He wrote in his autobiography, “After I saw a couple of pictures put out by some of my fellow comedy directors, which seemed to have abandoned the fun in favor of the message, I wrote Sullivan’s Travels to satisfy an urge to tell them that they were getting a little too deep-dish; to leave the preaching to the preachers.” If Sullivan’s Travels had turned out preachy, too, it would have been a self-defeating disaster. This delicate balance between making jokes, making a point, and making jokes about making a point is at the heart of every TV series that strives to be snarky-but-genuine-but-not-sappy, including Community and South Park. You also see it in the sweet undertones of the raunchy comedies by Judd Apatow and the Farrelly Brothers.

I love the titles of Sullivan’s previous dumb comedies: So Long Sarong, Hey Hey in the Hayloft, and Ants in Your Plants of 1939. Poking fun at Hollywood by coming up with intentionally silly fake movie titles is a longstanding tradition that continues to this day. (See, for example, the Adam Sandler character’s dopey comedies in Funny People: My Best Friend Is a Robot, Mer-Man, etc.) The title O Brother, Where Art Thou? is funny, too, a send-up of portentous-sounding Hollywood “message” movies. There must have been movies before Sullivan’s Travels that satirized Hollywood in this particular way, but I can’t locate any specific examples. Could it have been the first?

Also: What we would call an RV or a Winnebago today is here called a “land yacht.” A land yacht! We should call it that again. Please?

What’s the Big Deal?

Before Preston Sturges came along, nobody had established a successful career as a screenwriter and THEN become a director. Either you started out as both, or you stayed one or the other. His desire for creative control (and his having the talent to back it up) helped produce opportunities for countless other writer/directors. And Sullivan’s Travels specifically? Its satire of the Hollywood mentality was trenchant and biting in its day, and remains shockingly applicable 70 years later.

Further reading: You don’t need to worry about spoilers with this film, so go ahead and read this stuff before you watch it if you want to.

Here is Bosley Crowther’s original review in The New York Times, a very positive notice indeed. Todd McCarthy’s essay for the Criterion Collection sums it up pretty well; Turner Classic Movies’ notes offer some fascinating bits of trivia; Tim Dirks’ scene-by-scene analysis is illuminating as always; and the Movie Diva gives excellent background on Sturges and his work.

Tags: preston sturges, sullivan's travels, Veronica Lake, what's the big deal?