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SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS: A CRITIQUE OF THE NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION AND STYLE OF OPENING & CLOSING SCENES

Sullivan’s Travels (1941) USA 91 mins.
Source: CAC/NLA Prod Co: Paramount Prod: Paul Jones
Dir, Scr: Preston Sturges Ph: John F. Seitz
Ed: Stuart Gilmore Art Dir: Hans Dreier, Earl Hedrick
Cost: Edith Head Mus: Leo Shuken, Charles Bradshaw
Cast: Joel McCrae, Veronica Lake, Robert Warwick, William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Porter Hall

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Sullivan’s Travels opens abruptly on a fatalistic struggle between a young vagrant and a railroad yard boss on a boxcar roof as the train roars through the night. The two men fall off the train into a river in a fatalistic embrace. Through the rushing water The End slowly dissolves into view with a swelling musical finale. At that point the audience is made aware of the ‘film-in-film’ that had hitherto been concealed. The credits roll and Sullivan explains/sells to his producers the moral significance of the film; Capital and Labour killed by their mutual antagonism. He states his intention to make a more socially responsible film, “a true canvas of the suffering of humanity”. In this opening scene the overall narrative purpose has been created. As Sullivan declares, “I’m going down to the wardrobe and get some old clothes, some old shoes and I’m gonna start out with ten cents in my pocket. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m not coming back till I know what trouble is.”

Sullivan’s Travels is to be the story of a director’s quest, and this initial scene will only have resolution when it is mirrored by the closing scene, the montage of an old cartoon [Playful Pluto (1934) one of the last black and white cartoons Disney made] and prisoners laughing. But this opening scene also sets up a meta-narrational story of the director (Sturges, that is) and his quest to satirise, document and romanticize his industry and their relationship both to the particular American society of WWII era, to the Depression era he recounts, and to wider notions of America’s neurotic fixation on success, and their dichotomised fear of failure. Or as Manny Farber and W.S. Poster put it, the conception that America is “haunted by the spectres of…the living incarnations of the great American nightmare that some monstrous error can drive individuals clean out of society into a forlorn no-man’s land of scorn, derision and self-humiliation.”
But before the film can reveal the ‘final effect of the initial cause ’, it explores a series of ‘mini-quests’, of four voyages, which seek to demonstrate Sullivan’s descent in to hopelessness and his ultimate realisation that humorous movies (like religion, to which it is closely linked in the closing scene) are the therapeutic solution to the pain of poverty. This realisation thus decides his return to making entertaining comedies. In this manner his travels take him from a resolved push for a more socially realistic cinema to a reaffirmation of classical Hollywood motifs and messages.

So to the mini-voyages, a technique not uncommon in the “Hollywood fabula…[which is] the product of a series of particular schemata, hypotheses, and inferences.” Each voyage continues a causal chain of linearity begun in the ‘Capital v Labour film’ and finished in ‘Playful Pluto’.

The first sees Sullivan walking down a country road into the home of two peculiarly overbearing middle-aged woman. He escapes, not before ripping his pants and falling into a barrel filled with water, and hitches a ride. The next morning he awakes to find himself back in Hollywood, apparently destitute and hungry. He enters a roadside diner, where he meets a nameless starlet, The Girl, who from that point on will be his companion and eventually love interest.

The second voyage sees Sullivan and the Girl (who now realises he is not a vagrant) depart from a freight yard to discover the underbelly of America. They last a night, as they jump off the train at a small town to find the land yacht full of studio-types, who insist he recuperate (the rough night gave him ‘hog fever’) for three days as they travel to Las Vegas. Again aggravated for being returned to ‘Hollywood’ (in the mindset sense), Sullivan reflects about how he is repeatedly trapped in Hollywood and the movies (his first two voyages have portrayed varying film genres: one comical, one melodramatic).
"It's a funny thing how everything keeps shoving me back to Hollywood or Beverly Hills, or this monstrosity we're riding in. Almost like, like gravity, as if some force were saying, 'Get back where you belong. You don't belong out here in real life, you phony you!'...Maybe there's a universal law that says, 'Stay put. As you are, so shall you remain.' Maybe that's why tramps are always in trouble. They don't vote. They don't pay taxes. They violate the law of nature”
Sullivan’s dissertation on the nature of a tramp suggests a newfound comprehension of his superior station and the implausibility of any real contact with the downtrodden.

In the third voyage, without dialogue and with the pathos of a silent film, the couple stay at a flophouse, where they sleep on the floor with dozens of other down-and-outers and in the morning Sullivan realizes that one of the hobos has stolen his shoes (the ones with his identification card sewed into the sole, thus motioning a major effect in the syuzhet pattern). This event compels Sullivan and the Girl to work to survive, a situation the famous director presumably had never encountered.
Sullivan takes a job wearing a messaged sandwich board that advertises: "Why look like a tramp? MOE'S - Slightly Damaged Misfits - AT YOUR OWN TERMS." Following close behind is the Girl - whose sign reads: "MOE UNFAIR TO UNION PANTS MAKERS". The signs contest each other - they are the Capital and Labour characters within the film in the opening scene. Interestingly, Sullivan is unable to escape the assessment of himself as Capital, seemingly his intent at the outset.

In the fourth voyage Sullivan returns to the streets to hand out bills to the vagrants, a simplistic change of tack. If he cannot put himself in a bum’s shoes (although figuratively he did) he will instead shower them with money from on high. By coincidence (that sly Hollywood construct), the bum who stole Sullivan’s shoes sees him handing out money and knocks him out, robs him, and drags him onto a train. The bum flees, but drops money and is killed by a train as he tries to retrieve it. Because he is wearing Sullivan’s shoes it is assumed by Hollywood that Sullivan is dead. However Sullivan awakes when the train stops, groggy, and reacts badly to the hounding of the railroad yard boss. So badly in fact that he ends up in jail, completely bereft of his identity and freedom. He no longer has the safety harness of his Hollywood world, for they believe him dead. While in prison, he comes to be transformed and illuminated by a religiously over-toned revelation. He is show a movie, and a Disney cartoon at that, as part of the convict crowd invited into a small Negro church.
After they are seated, the lights are dimmed and a creaky old projector begins showing a Walt Disney cartoon - Playful Pluto. The convicts and churchgoers immediately begin laughing, guffawing, and smiling at the ridiculous simplicity of the frantic cartoon. Sullivan sits glumly at first, but then looks around with amazement at the uproarious laughter from the audience. Soon, he is laughing too, realizing the therapeutic properties of comedies, that, like religion, help people temporarily forget their troubles, release their suffering and escape from the hardships of the world.

The ending is possible the only plausible conclusion a Hollywood film could make, no matter how radical the director. Nevertheless, the holistic integrity of Sullivan’s travels and the difficult subject matter are undermined by such a placatory conclusion.

According to Dan Harper , the movie fails to realise its value as documentation of Depression-era America, and further, that Sturges:

“only uses it to reinforce his laboured point – that none of this matters…that we want to be entertained (his emphasis) by something so richly superfluous, so magisterially superficial that we are taken, with our hearty consent, to a place so beautiful or ridiculous that life itself – our life – becomes a distant murmur, a bothersome echo outside the tender confines of the theatre”

What most be given at least some trifling attention is the variable link between what the protagonist (in this case Sullivan, the director) concludes, and what the auteur (in this case Sturges, both screenwriter and director) concludes. It can be hoped, but not investigated here, that Sturges might have made his protagonist follow an anti-communist rationale to prove some other point.

That other point? Oh, I don’t know, possibly the overwhelming influence of Hollywood as a machine of American cultural hegemony?

By opening Sullivan’s Travels with a screening of film-in-film, and closing it with a montage of laughing faces and a Disney cartoon Sturges exploits specific aspects of narration, particularly structural considerations. The self-reflexiveness of this technique opens up the process of narration, making the act of presenting the story to the audience a tangible, obvious construction. The film is peppered with tongue-in-cheek pokes at Hollywood and the Hollywood stereotypes, even, in the end, the ‘director with a message’.

Police Sergeant: How does the girl fit in this picture?
Sullivan: There's always a Girl in the picture. Haven't you ever been to the movies?

Sullivan’s Travels was made in 1942, and when taken in historical context the ultimate moral reasoning of the film can be seen to imply a reactionary, anti-communist sentiment of ‘Capital knows best’, while ‘Labour’ merely needs some idle entertainment, as Sullivan so reassuringly excuses himself from the abandonment of his aim at the end of the film:

“There's a lot to be said for making people laugh! Did you know that's all some people have? It isn't much but it's better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan! Boy!”

Bibliography

Bordwell, David. “Classical Hollywood Cinema: Narrational Principles and Procedures.” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Reader. Ed. Philip Rosen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 17-34.

Curtis, James. Between Flops: A Biography of Preston Sturges. New York & London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

Farber, Manny and W.S. Poster. “Preston Sturges: Success in the Movies.” Film Culture, 26 (Winter 1962): 9-16

Melbourne Cinematheque

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