Interested Article About 'Sullivan's Travels'

Mitt Romney? Au contraire. This movie was about as popular as a movie could be in Santa Monica in the late 70s/early 80s, when Z Channel (our local cable company literally everyone had to subscribe to if you wanted to watch more than a couple of stations with terrible static--I have no idea why, but S.M. could not get any TV reception.) held a tribute to Preston Sturges, playing many of his movies, including, in a big way, this one. Everyone LOVED this movie! And Sturges. Santa Monica's nickname at the time, btw, was The People's Republic of Santa Monica. Our elected state rep was Tom Hayden, member of the Chicago 8 and at the time, husband of Jane Fonda. I doubt our movie tastes were in any way similar to Mitt Romney's. Utah is close to where I live now, and I'm familiar with what's popular there--it's not Preston Sturges. They glorify family, church, and successful business, not necessarily in that order.

I don't understand where viewers are getting the idea that Sturges was being judgemental toward the classes of people who had been hit the hardest by the Great Depression. Do you agree that there was a Great Depression? Are you the new deniers who downplay how hard the economic crash hit regular people? Who hate FDR and are trying to minimize his contributions by minimizing the crisis America, and all countries were facing. Are you familiar with the escapist movies that began with the crash in 1929? The more deprivation people suffered (my mom's family had lost one child to the Spanish Influenza, and the rest were hungry their entire childhoods. Calcium deficiencies, other illnesses such as Scarlet Fever. The family owned a boarding house and the kids worked there until finally going to a church boarding school where they worked a farm to support the school, provide food for students. My mom never recovered from the cold they grew up with in rural Wisconsin...), the greater their need to find an escape. Which could be found in entertainment, religion, activism, alcohol....but mostly entertainment.

Fiction on radio and in films greatly helped people get through those years. Silly variety shows and serials the whole family and a neighbor or two would gather round the radio to hear...movies of poor shopgirls who meet the exciting millionaire or the debutante and her crazy family who adopt a bum as part of a scavenger hunt at a party for frivolous people with too much money and no need to work...Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing and singing, maybe falling in love, and more frivolous rich people with no sense...humor, music, stories to engage them so they would not think about how tough life was. Theaters were full even though money was scarce.

People crave the escapism. It's not an insult to them--it's the basis of first, touring medicine and wild west shows, and the evangelical faith healing preachers, and traveling circuses, then vaudeville, and later radio, movies, then television. The entertainment industry was created in response to the need of people to escape their day-to-day existence, probably long before the ancient Greeks' tragedies. It's not insulting people to acknowledge their need for escapist fare--and studies confirm what Hollywood recognized almost 100 yrs ago--fantasy and humor make people feel the best. Laughter causes our bodies to secrete endorphins. That's huge--exerxcise, like sports, religion, love, and laughter--and the last 2 can be done vicariously with Hollywood's help! And if you are out of work and wishing you had more to eat, the last thing you want to watch is hungry people worried about getting a job.

Watching ridiculously rich people looking silly, or worse, so long as it was good natured fun, at the expense of people who hadn't a care--as the Marx Bros. and W.C. Fields were able to do so well made people whose own lives were difficult feel a lot better. And Preston Sturges did it in an even more intelligent and witty way. He lampooned Hollywood, and the Hollywood Press Corp mercilessly. But the suffering regular people were always presented sympathetically--even the criminals. The ratty old guy who worked for the warden snuck Sullivan extra water, and showed he had a heart, empathizing with Sullivan's suffering. It was the Warden who was a jerk, violent and judgemental (tho saying it was his experience that created his perceptions). The restaurant owner was a good guy (as were the studio employees who just did a job, what they were told). The Minister was presented well (earning a commendation from the govt for the positive presentation of "Negroes"). The Defense Attorney was shown trying to present a good case, while a few bad men were presented unsympathetically...the judge (and cases were being heard in appellate courts that led to requirements that defendent's with mental issues be examined by doctors before trial) was unsympathetic. The RR security were bad guys (but they too were famous for their violence, as were all security for hire men, as the Pinkerton men who were hired to break-up strikes at factories).

History has documented that those Sturges lambasted actually did those things. Sturges didn't create them, he just used them. And he didn't present common men as bad until their lives wore them down--then you saw the desperation behind their choice. A close-up to their face before they struck. And then their fate...the morgue...did it follow their wrong choice, the new shoes of cash...?

If you see judgement in Sturges portrayal of the common man, I believe it's a projection of something from within yourself. Either a political predisposition to reject Stuges' message, or a misunderstanding of the era... It's not something Preston Sturges felt. And remember, this was 1941, the 19th century and robber barons were as close to them as LBJ and Nixon are to us. Was the term "patronizing" even in the dictionary yet? Certainly, subtlety was not an art appreciated in Hollywood yet. So some leeway has to be granted, based on good intentions. If he had harbored negative attitudes about the little guy, or the common folk, you'd have seen him show it with a sledgehammer. They'd be treated like the press, the studio hangers-on, the warden and the judge. There would be no questions about it.