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Summary: Puts Shakespeare back with the shipping news
Review: Film critics rave about "Sullivan's Travels" because it's about film-making. My only quibble would be the scene where Joel McCrea and his fellow convicts are laughing their heads off while watching Disney cartoons -- when Sturges reprises some of this scene near the end of the film, it strikes me as being untypically simplistic and sentimental for a Sturges film -- it seems more appropriate to a Frank Capra film. My favorite line is : "It'll put Shakespeare back with the shipping news!" Sturges is greater than Shakespeare! You can delete lines form "Hamlet," but there are almost no lines I'd want to delete from any Sturges film.
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Summary: STURGES and VERONICA LAKE AT THEIR BEST
Review: Buy it, don't loan it (like I did), guard it. It's Sturges, Veronica Lake and Joel McRae at their best.
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Summary: Joel McCrea = worst actor ever?
Review: Good Lord is that kid terrible! The "sneezing" he does in this film is just beyond annoyance. I saw this film after seeing Criterion's "My Man Godfrey" and what can I say, everything that film is this is not. That is to say, witty, sophisticated, and never pandering to its audience. this whole film is a series of three-stooges style gags. And the underlying message is so Disney Touchstone I don't give a rip how old the film is. It still (. . .) P.S. and Veronica Lake can't act worth beans
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Summary: A FILM TO CHERISH!
Review: One of the most respected and admired director/writers of the forties, Preston Sturge's career fell apart after a decade of critical and commercial successes. Sadly, he died an out-of-fashion, nearly forgotton man in 1959. SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS is one of the director genius's finest films - and certainly one of his most personal - in that it's about a Hollywood director; this is his version of "the clown who wants to play Hamlet". The film undertakes a bold assignment. Its narrative shifts from comedy to tragedy and back to comedy, something seldom successfully accomplished in the movies. Those who criticise the film usually do so on the basis of its serious scenes when the hero, Joel McCrea, is arrested and sent to a prison chain gang where the only thing the convicts have to look forward to is the cartoon they share with a black church group on special occasions. This movie's stucture, however, is skillfully executed, and the hero's descent into a social hell uncushioned by money and power is presented largely through an effective montage, followed by the prison sequence. The ultimate return to comedy is indeed abrupt, but it demonstrates the theme of the film. The most successful portions of the film are those in which he satirizes Hollywood with an insider's advantage. As always, Sturges was adept at pointing out the absurdity and essential phonies of a world which, rotten to the core and corrupted by the desires for money and success, maintains an outward sheen of respectability and good manners.
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Summary: MASTERPIECE
Review: Lost in the autumnal DVD delivery, there is the Criterion release of Preston Sturges's SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS. Don't overlook this peculiar DVD, it will be one of the essential DVD releases of the year 2001. Preston Sturges directed half of dozen masterpieces in the early forties in Hollywood and is considered now as the Father of the writers-directors guild. Nobody before him had the right to have his name printed before the title of the movie. Writer and director, Preston Sturges had a career à la Orson Welles : flamboyant but so short. Enjoy the wonderful 76 minutes documentary "The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer" presented as a bonus feature of this release, enjoy the only opportunity to admire Veronica Lake on DVD, enjoy this festival of smart dialogs and comic scenes. In short, enjoy. A DVD zone your library.
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Summary: Oh Brother!
Review: Preston Sturges wrote and directed 5 or 6 of the greatest comedies ever filmed, no small accomplishment considering just how rare such movies are these days. There's no need to bemoan the lack of celebration of this filmmaker as there has been a recent spate of homage/imitation releases, ie. State & Main, Oh Brother Where Art Thou, etc..
The Coen Brothers' effort obviously aims at Sullivan, a film that mixes both sophisticated and broad humor with some sense of consciousness of the misery of depression era America. However, resisting sentimentality, Sturges rejects the self-aggrandizing mentality of "I feel your pain.", instead suggesting dignity, charity, and the importance of temporary relief through the commonality of trancending the human condition, ie. comedy.
It's a hell of a great flick. Also look out for The Lady Eve, The Palm Beach Story, and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.
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Summary: Superb Criterion Release of Sturges Gem Nearly Pefect, but -
Review: ... it sports the worst commentary track I've ever heard. Don't let this give you a moment's pause about buying "Sullivan's Travels" on this fabulous DVD, but dial back your expectations for the commentary track to zero unless you find it fascinating to hear people commenting on "the first time they saw it on tv" and what was cut from the TV print. I'm a big fan of Guest and McKean, multi-talented masters of modern comedy - but here, they are little more than masters of the obvious and have little of value to add. (The "American Masters" bigraphy of Sturges is a sensational extra that more than makes up for the lack of a useful commentary track). Please, Criterion, next time, leave the commentary to those who have something of interest to say.
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Summary: Sullivan's Travels: Hot Ice and Wondrous Strange Snow
Review: At the beginning of writer-director Preston Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels," worried Hollywood studio heads resist director John Sullivan's (Joel McCrea) desire to make a socially important movie about America's poor, telling him that such a movie cannot be made, least of all by him-a director of such cheerful comedies as "Hey Hey In The Hayloft" and "Ants In Your Plants of 1939"-because he simply doesn't know anything about the huddled masses upon whom he intends to shine his moral lantern. Sullivan therefore dresses as a tramp and sets out to get a first-hand look at what a tramp's life is really like. For the rest of the movie (ostensibly a comedy), Sullivan endures the indignities, hardships and outrageous injustice to which tramps are indifferently and routinely subjected. By this amazing feat of paralepsis (that is, the device of emphasizing a thing by omitting it or mentioning it only cursorily), Sturges manages to present precisely the socially-significant, "Important" picture that he never stops telling us cannot be made. Along the way, he also succeeds where Shakespeare's clowns in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" fail, viz., he creates "very tragical mirth."
Arguably his best movie, "Sullivan's Travels" is one of the greatest movies ever made. Sturges' extraordinarily literate and witty dialogue has never been matched, very rarely even approached (although John Collier's wonderful dialogue in "Deception" is a real contender). Yet for all his sophistication and the scintillating brilliance of his rapid-fire dialogue, Sturges was also a master of lowbrow buffoonery and regularly included extended sequences with no dialogue whatsoever. He was adept at everything he took an interest in, and he was interested in everything. He loved all aspects of movie making, and his pictures-"Sullivan's Travels" especially-are wonderfully cinematic, full of amazing crane shots, extraordinarily long dolly shots and other displays of virtuoso camera work. But his virtuosity-unlike, say, Orson Welles'-is at all times tempered by discretion and an irreproachable sense of what is suitable and necessary. His cinematography is as ingenious as Welles', but less ostentatious, more æsthetically pleasing, and always, always to the purpose. "Sullivan's Travels" is one of the strangest blends of comedy and drama that you're likely to see. It's usually categorized as a comedy, but despite the exceptionally witty banter and a few masterfully choreographed slapstick set-pieces, don't be surprised if you don't remember laughing when it's over. For despite the superbly antic dialogue and the incredible number of sharply-delineated comic types capering about on its surface, "Sullivan's Travels" is an unusually serious and serious-minded picture. Each comic sequence plays in the shadow of drama; the drama, moreover, is of rare and surprising intensity. It presents as stark a depiction of Depression Era misery as anything in "The Grapes of Wrath"-starker, if you ask me. For one thing, since "The Grapes of Wrath" takes place entirely among the poor, Tom Joad and his family exist, as it were, in a vacuum of destitution. Keeping the story entirely within the narrow confines of the Joad's world demonstrates restraint and (perhaps) artistic integrity, but such integrity comes at a price. For the poverty that initially startles and sickens us, loses, as we grow familiar with it, its powerful hold on our emotions. John Ford also succumbs, as he always does, to sentimentality: the sodden sweepings from Emotion's banquet-as if the grim world he presents would be too much for us to bear if left unpalliated by a few Fordian flourishes of sugared-over "humanity."
"Sullivan's Travels" is an overtly emotional movie, refreshing for the sincerity and grandeur of its emotionalism. Often overbroad, nearly crude in its obviousness, it is never sentimental because, for all its exaggeration, it tells the truth. Sturges places poverty in context by emphasizing the stark difference between the lives of the rich and poor. Witty scenes depicting the empty-headed idle rich at play provide ironic contrast to scenes played among crowds of starving, hollow-eyed wraiths huddled into nightmarish work camps, charity wards and Hoovervilles. By themselves, the comic scenes at the Hollywood studio and at Sullivan's shimmering stucco mansion would be delicious and charming; juxtaposed amidst depictions of want, however, comedy starts to looks frivolous, even callous, nearly poisonous: the antithesis of comic relief. In "Sullivan's Travel's" comedy makes tragedy more desperately cruel. Yet it also argues convincingly that comedy is our only hope against despair.
The Criterion Collection's recent release of "Sullivan's Travels" is what DVD technology is all about. The crystal clear digital transfer alone makes the DVD well worth having, but there is also an excellent Emmy Award winning documentary about Sturges' life as well as an interesting interview with his widow, Sandy Sturges (an amazingly well-spoken, beautiful and likeable woman), and an often amusing commentary track featuring, among others, Christopher Guest and Michael McKean.
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Summary: Near Great Film -- 1st Rate DVD
Review: "Sullivan's Travels" is not my favorite Preston Sturges film, but it's close. This DVD however, made me reassess the film. The commentary is amusing (three commentators, with three different moods: respectful, academic, and irreverent). Even better is the very generous 76 minute "American Masters" documentary devoted to Sturges. It has a wonderful overview of Sturges' career. Additionally, Criterion surpasses its own high standards with a flawless B&W transfer, one of the best I've seen. Well worth the purchase price.
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Summary: Bizarre sound encoding
Review: Dolby Digital 1.0Meaning it's all directed to the center channel. Usually most mono titles (often old movies) are DD 2.0, with the mono sound directed to the left and right speakers. This 1.0 business is odd and annoying. Criterion goofed.
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