Sullivan's Travels

Preston Sturges, 1941, bw (8.8*)
[Our post of the top ranked films of Preston Sturges]

A Hollywood director of escapist films decides he needs to experience real life instead of his Hollywooden one. He pretends to be a hobo and hit the road without money or any identity, and of course, with an assumed name, and see how life really is in America at the true grass roots level.

Of couse, he experiences far more than he imagined beforehand, and suffice to say it’s a life-changing experiment. The men he meets give him a new perspective on America and on himself as well. Joel McRea shines in probably his best performance as Sullivan. Veronica Lake (see photo above) provides welcome eye candy, she's quite attractive when she "puts on her face".

I think what Sturges adds is a kind of unabashed honesty that doesn’t seem forced - ok, maybe it is a little corny. That in itself is refreshing, so this film endures as a classic today. It’s also a film about a filmmaker making a film, there aren’t many better that come to my reputed mind. Perhaps only Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), with an altogether different feel, as it’s a serious film with sarcasm, a murder mixed with romance and heavily tinged with cynicism regarding Hollywood and the film industry, where the prime concern is to find a mega-profitable ‘project’, something the public will gobble up.

Writer-director Sturges makes this type of film like no one else except Capra, where comedy, or at least looking at life in a humorous way (it doesn’t have to be gut-busting, insane comedy) is used to get us into a story that then teaches a valuable lesson learned through experience, something you can’t find out any other way, which is your relationship to society and the world.

The Coen Brothers have often cited Sturges as influential on their work. There are similarities of a chase in Raising Arizona (1987) to one in Sullivan’s Travels. The title O' Brother Where Art Thou is the name of the movie that Sullivan wishes to direct in Sullivan’s Travels. There’s a terrific scene of people watching a movie that was repeated with variations in Italian Guiseppe Tournatore’s Oscar®-winning Cinema Paradiso (1988), so the Sturges influence is worldwide, as it should be.

This is a highly underrated comedy at #296 all-time, it’s certainly better than many ranked ahead of it. See the full poll in our 2011 update of the Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls. I’m sure it’s among the top 100 comedies, however.

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Bugville

Aka Hoppity Goes to Town, Mr. Bug Goes to Town
Dave Fleischer, 1941 (8.5*)
Early animated classic from the Fleischer Brothers studio, those animation pioneers who created Popeye and Betty Boop, and also many technical devices that advanced the art to cinematic proportions.

In this story, bugs have a nice community going in a deserted lot near Broadway, where people rarely go by – some that do pose a threat by tossing lit cigarettes or cans, which become housefires and earthquakes for bugville. It’s actually part of an estate that’s seen better days, but is now in the hands of a struggling songwriter, played by Kenny Gardner, but based on songwriter Hoagy Carmichael, who wrote the song “Castle in the Sky” used here. Dick Dickens (yep..) needs to sell this song to keep the house, and those metaphorical lyrics become important to this plot.

Meanwhile in Bugville, Swat the Fly and Smash the Mosquito are the eyes and ears of evil landowner C. Bagley Beetle, who wants everything for himself. They spy on the happy inhabitants which include Hoppity, who’s courting Honey Bee, whom Beetle also desires, and whose dad runs the local Honey Shop, which is the local hangout of all the other bugs. (Ya gotta love a film with Swat the Fly as a character)

Hoppity takes off one day and finds the main house, with a well-tended garden, which he sees as paradise, and returns to the lowlands bugville and convinces the others he’s found a nicer, safer home. Along with garden hoses causing floods, the bugs find many other impediments to finding a new happy home, including climbing a skyscraper, a story which is paralled by the human character Dick, the songwriter.

I saw this long ago as “Hoppity Goes to Town” [see below], and couldn’t understand why it’s not as well-known as the Disney classics. It’s certainly in the classic 30’s animation style, it’s full color, is pretty funny, and has some pretty good music, especially the Castle in the Sky song by Carmichael. Plus it has BUGS! Decades before Bugz, and A Bug’s Life, Antz, and all the others (I’m just making up titles now.. but you get the picture, lotsa varmints in the cartoons..)

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Here Comes Mr. Jordan

Alexander Hall, 1941, bw (8.8*)
A man named Joe, played by Robert Montgomery, is grabbed by an angel just before his assumed death, but in heaven it's discovered that he wasn't due to die yet. So due to their own bureaucratic bungling, they decide to send him back down, only his body is no longer available and he has to get another body. He's a professional boxer, due for a title fight, so he's fairly picky and doesn't want just any old body. The head angel, a Mr. Jordan, or Claude Rains, tells him he can't dawdle around or the big guy may change his mind.

Unfortunately, the best one available is a recent murder victim, as his wife and her lover are trying to get rid of a selfish millionaire and live on his money. The one personality trait Joe maintains is his desire to play the saxophone, but he's not very good at it. This is the classic mix-up of godly proportions, and I guess to be accurate you could call it a 'fish out of his body' tale.

This is the original bw classic using this idea, which was later re-written and remade by Warren Beatty and Buck Henry in 1978 as Heaven Can Wait, which featured Beatty as a football player with a clarinet, Julie Christie, James Mason (as Mr. Jordan) and Charles Grodin and Dyan Cannon as the hilarious would-be murderers.

Winner of 2 Oscars® (Story, screenplay) out of 7 nominations, which included picture, director, cinematography, and two for lead actor.

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King's Row

Sam Wood, 1941, bw (7.9*)
Beautifully photographed melodrama of the facade behind the small American community of King's Row is easily Ronald Reagan's best role and film. However, he's about 5th best in a stellar cast, deftly handled by director Sam Wood to keep this from being overly sentimental, kind of a Booth Tarkington meets Peyton Place.

The story follows two childhood best friends, Robert Cummings (excellent here) as an upper crust kid from the scenic hills who later becomes a psychiatrist in Vienna before returning, and Reagan as a free-wheeling orphan living on a trust fund who'd rather spend time with ladies than do any real work. Beneath the town's sleepy facade lies insanity, tragedy, class prejudice, and in a brilliant bit of out-of-character acting, veteran Charles Coburn as an overbearing town doctor with a hidden sadistic streak. The terrific cast also features Betty Field, Judith Anderson, Maria Ouspenskaya, and Claude Rains - so you can see how the sometimes hammy Reagan would be about 5th best at his finest (he still reminds me of a salesman, like most politicians), and actually in his words, his 'star making' performance.

Perhaps a little predictable, but still worth seeing as a classic Hollywood era drama. Oscar® nominations for picture, director Sam Wood, and b&w cinematography.

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Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

Edward F. Cline, 1941, bw (8.1*)
This film defines the word zany, perhaps the funniest W.C. Fields film, certainly the craziest. Fields tries to sell a completely preposterous script to a Hollywood film mogul, and we get to witness all the crazy action he describes. In one scene he falls from an airplane onto the poolside divan at a mountaintop castle-like retreat of a reclusive wealthy widow, Mrs. Hemogloben (Margaret Dumont) and her daughter (Gloria Jean), without injury of course. We also get to see one of the great car chase sequences ever imagined, with police and a fire truck also involved. Even those who aren't fans of Fields slow, painstaking delivery should enjoy this romp. They never made comedies any more 'screwball' than this one. Fields co-wrote the screenplay as well, which the censors at the time found to be a bit too risque with some well-worded innuendos.

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The Lady Eve

Dir: Preston Sturges, 1941, bw (8.5*)

This is one of the original con artist films, as Barbara Stanwyck and her scheming father, Charles Coburn, as good as ever, decide to bilk gullible and nerdish capitalist Henry Fonda, aboard an ocean liner. The pair steals the comedy, which also throws some good lines to William Demerest ("she's the same dame, I tell ya!"). Of course, it wouldn't be a classic bw comedy unless the lead stars become romantically involved. The terrific story has some twists and complexity that made it stand out from others of its era. One of the best from the heyday of Preston Sturges.

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The Maltese Falcon

Dir: John Huston, 1941, bw (9.0*)

One of the great treasure hunts on film, a film noir mystery from the pen of Dashiell Hammett, a Sam Spade novel. Thankfully George Raft turned down the part, and it made Humphrey Bogart a star. The terrific Huston script has Bogart investigating his partner's murder and he runs into Sydney Greenstreet, who is hunting for a jeweled, golden falcon left behind by the Knights Templar in the middle ages. Peter Lorre is in on the plot, as is his client Mary Astor. The ever present Elisha Cook is Greenstreet's gun.

Quote: Oh, you're good, you're real good alright. (Bogart to Astor)

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Citizen Kane

Orson Welles, 1941, bw (9.0*)

AFI and Time Mag Top 100

What many consider the best American movie or even overall best film ever made has certainly withstood the test of time, though its merits may be overrated by today's standards.

Orson Welle's film achieved acclaim for some innovations that aren't that important, such as the first film to show ceilings, thus proving they either weren't sets, or that the sets were more complete. What's even better is the film's pace, the fact that Orson Welles was only 26 at the time, and that it attacked a living person's undue influence, newspaper baron William Randolph Hurst, at a time when he was still alive and powerful enough to try to quash the picture. Hurst is noted for creating the Spanish-American war to sell papers, also for paying Emelio Zapata to "fight a revolution" for the same reason, he even funded Zapata's uprising.

Overall, the film can be depressing and pessimistic, but that doesn't make it less true as some of the more evil, self-centered people alive have achieved great wealth and influence over "the masses" by controlling the media. One Oscar, for Welles' screenplay, which many critics consider Oscar's biggest oversight, as many think the film and Welles should have have won.

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