silver nitrate notes

Sullivan's Travels and Preston Sturges's Disguise

9 may 2019

Preston Sturges (1898-1959) wrote and directed Sullivan's Travels (1941) at Paramount, in the middle of a run of films he made between 1940 and 1944 that remain the best sustained streak by a writer-director in classical Hollywood. The cinematographer was John F. Seitz, whom we have met on Double Indemnity, This Gun for Hire, and Sunset Boulevard. Seitz worked with Sturges on most of the Paramount pictures. What Seitz brought to the Sturges films was the ability to light rapid dialogue for visibility and specificity.

The premise is a reversal. John Sullivan (Joel McCrea) is a successful Hollywood director of musical comedies who decides he wants to make a socially conscious picture about poverty. He dresses as a hobo, refuses his agent's expense money, and sets out to experience poverty directly. What happens is a series of reversals: he keeps accidentally returning to Hollywood, he accumulates a reluctant companion (Veronica Lake), he eventually gets beaten and robbed, is mistaken for a murderer, and is sent to a chain gang in Mississippi. On the chain gang, he learns the lesson the film has been preparing for him: what the poor want from the movies is not social commentary. What they want is a laugh.

The lesson is easy to mock. Sturges is not unaware of the mock. The film's ending, where Sullivan watches the chain gang laugh hysterically at a Mickey Mouse cartoon, is played straight and is funny at the same time. Sturges is making a case for his own kind of cinema against the kind of cinema Sullivan thought he should be making. That the case is partly self-serving is not the same as saying the case is wrong.

Seitz shoots the film in two registers. The Hollywood sequences are lit high-key, with the camera at a conversational distance. The hobo sequences, particularly the long middle section when Sullivan and Lake are genuinely out of money, are lit low-key with available-looking light. The shift in register is not announced. By the time Sullivan is on the chain gang, Seitz is using a vocabulary closer to the noir films Paramount would produce three years later.

Veronica Lake is, in this film, twenty-one. McCrea is thirty-six. They never work together again, though Lake would have many reasons to wish they had.

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sources
[1] Sturges, Preston. Preston Sturges on Preston Sturges. Faber, 1991.
[2] Jacobs, Diane. Christmas in July: The Life and Art of Preston Sturges. University of California Press, 1992.
[3] Curtis, James. Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges. Harcourt, 1982.
[4] Henderson, Brian (ed.). Five Screenplays by Preston Sturges. University of California Press, 1985.