SYNOPSIS
Sullivan’s Travels starts with Joel McCrea’s Sullivan, a director of comedies who wants to get serious with an adaptation of a novel called Brother, Where Art Thou? being berated by studio bosses because he isn’t making ‘Ants in their Pants’, and anyway doesn’t know the meaning of the poverty the book talks about. So he borrows a tramp’s outfit from the wardrobe department and takes to the highway, with a large bus owned by the studio full of doctors, bodyguards and secretaries at a discreet distance behind him. The more he tries to break away from Hollywood, the faster it comes towards him. Sullivan’s Travels is a hoot, but it is not quite just that, despite its brilliant mixture of visual gags that might have come from silent comedy and laughter generated by witty dialogue. People have tended to say that Sturges’s films were as schizophrenic as he was. If that’s so, long live abstracted directors, since they tend to see the world as it is rather than as we might wish it to be.
