In Pulp’s dizzyingly classic song “Common People,” Jarvis Cocker tells the story of a rich Greek girl who comes to England to study sculpture and learn what life is like for people living on the other side of the socio-economic paradigm. Completely out of touch and thinking that “poor is cool,” this character simply doesn’t get it. Even if she experiences the same misery as the have-nots that fascinate her, Cocker castigates her in the lyric: “If you call your Dad he could stop it all.”
Such naval-gazing is a luxury the privileged can indulge. When I was living in Annapolis, the members of the Unitarian Church there spent a weekend on the streets, living with homeless people, as a way to “bear witness.” But could they really replicate the feelings of hopelessness and destitution that these displaced people had experienced? Just like Cocker’s protagonist, they exist with the knowledge that a hot meal and a warm bed await them at the end of that weekend of impoverishment.
If you look to Hollywood, there are countless films where characters slide from one social class to another. When it’s a rich character that suddenly loses his fortunes, there is typically a moral involved. However, when poor characters manage to leap into a higher social stratum, it’s the makings for a happy ending. So what is Hollywood trying to tell us? That being rich will solve all of our problems? Even the characters in Back to the Future, people who are decidedly middle class, aren’t truly happy until the end when they escape the doldrums of working class life.
According to film critic Stuart Klawans, Preston Sturges’ 1941 film, Sullivan’s Travels, differs from many Hollywood movies because its simple message is this: “Learn your place.” The movie begins with comedy director John L. Sullivan (Joel McRea) hankering to make a serious film, one that will bring a strong social message to the masses like The Grapes of Wrath. In their attempt to talk Sullivan out of this potential blunder, his producers argue that even though these types of pictures do have box office potential, Sullivan just isn’t the right man to direct one. Besides, he never suffered, coming from a posh boarding school. Angered, the hot-headed Sullivan then decides to earn the chance to direct such a movie and claims he will set out to “find trouble” with only a dime in his pocket, much to the chagrin of his bosses.
Although he does eventually find the trouble he is looking for, it takes Sullivan a long time to recognize the sheer privilege he enjoys with his beautiful Los Angeles mansion and team of minders watching his every move. Even when he is pulled over for a traffic infraction, the cops let him off the hook because of who he is. At first, all attempts to skip town (such as jumping a railroad car) eventually lead him back to Los Angeles. But he is never satisfied and pushes deeper into life as a hobo, captured brilliantly by Sturges in a wordless montage.
“Sullivan’s Travels is very much about learning to accept one’s place in the world,” Klawans writes. “This is where Sturges departed from the makers of the message movies of his day. Those writers and directors showed people struggling within a society that could change whereas Sturges had no such expectations.” And that is the realization Sullivan reaches at the end of the film: Making people laugh and forget their troubles is an endeavor just as noble as making a movie about the condition of man.
Though Sullivan’s Travels can be billed as a comedy, many of its comedic segments have not aged well. A sequence where Sullivan and a girl (Veronica Lake) he befriends on his travels fall into his pool over and over again doesn’t match the majesty of the rest of the film, and an early section where a black cook becomes the butt of a series of slapstick moments feels racially insensitive. It’s the film’s other segments, where Sullivan learns what life is really like for people who have no place to sleep that catapults Sullivan’s Travels into classic status. As a comedy, the film is most successful in its lockstep script where Sullivan, Lake’s character and his handlers spar in witty repartee. But it’s the film’s forays into life on the rails and in shantytowns and even a late sequence on a chain gang that give emotional resonance to the entire endeavor, culminating in sequence in a black church where Sullivan learns the importance of laughter.
Sturges may have worked within the Hollywood system he embraces and lampoons here, but Sullivan’s Travels is a deeper sort of art than the majority of pictures of its time. Nearly 75 years later, it still retains its power of laughter and pathos.