Sullivan’s Travels (1941)
is a madcap romp and not-so-incidental grim social commentary—a most striking
combination. Writer/director Preston
Sturges deftly constructs a screwball comedy around the framework of a sensitive
and serious examination of poverty—while lambasting Joel McCrea’s naïve character
for even seeking a social message. As he
begins his exploration of what it is to be poverty stricken so that he may
produce a deep and profound message film instead of his usual comedies, Joel
McCrea’s first and perhaps best admonition against such a quest comes from his
butler.
“I have never been sympathetic of
caricature of the poor and needy, sir.”
This is our entry in the Butlers and
Maids Blogathon hosted by Rich at Wide Screen World and Paddy at Caftan Woman. For more on butlers and maids, please see
these posts by some terrific bloggers.
Robert Grieg plays film director
Joel McCrea’s butler in this movie, and Eric Blore his valet. So intentionally anonymous are they that they
are not given names, only referred to in credits as Sullivan’s Butler and
Valet. Both men spent much of their film
careers playing butlers. Mr. Grieg, born
in Australia in the 1870s, and Blore born in London in the 1880s, were perhaps
destined for a life of genteel servitude on film in the caste system of
Hollywood character actors. Their
accents, their ages, their physical types certainly recommended them for the
job, and that indefatigable knack of being silly and supremely dignified at the
same time, their very dignity being the springboard of their comedy. They died
a year apart from each other in the late 1950s, an era when the British butler
was becoming scarcer in Hollywood.
The movie begins ridiculously
enough with Joel McCrea, a director fed up with producing comedies and seeking
a serious subject worthy of a work of art, announces to the aghast studio heads
played by Robert Warwick and Porter Hall his intention not to direct any more
comedies. Mr. McCrea is starving for
satisfaction in his work, takes himself and his art very seriously, and having
been raised with all the financial and social advantages of the monied class,
is completely innocent about the harsh world of poverty.
Quite unexpectedly, the silliness
is deflated like a balloon pricked with a pin early on in the movie when the
fast-talking McCrea is brought short by the sonorous tones of his suddenly serious
butler, Robert Grieg. Grieg, unlike most
Hollywood butlers, gets the honor of a closeup and a thoughtful soliloquy.
“If you’ll permit me to say so,
sir, the subject is not an interesting one. The poor know all about poverty,
and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamorous.”
Mr. McCrea defends his
intentions, “But I’m doing it for the poor….”
To which Mr. Grieg adamantly
responds, “I don’t think they would appreciate it, sir. They rather resent the
invasion of their privacy—I believe quite properly, sir. Also, such an
excursion can be extremely dangerous, sir.”
This is not the “walk this way”
nose-in-air schtick of the Hollywood butler.
“You see, sir, rich people and
theorists, who are usually rich people, think of poverty in the negative, as
the lack of riches as disease might be called a lack of health, but it isn’t. Poverty is not the lack of anything but is a
positive plague, virulent in and of itself, contagious as cholera, with filth,
criminality, vice, despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed
away from even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned.”
Baffled and rebuffed, McCrea
responds, “Well, you seem to have made quite a study of it.”
Mr. Grieg answers, “Quite
unwillingly, sir. Will that be all,
sir?”
Eric Blore, his valet, cleverly
conceals identification in the soles of McCrea’s shoes like a mother protecting
her boy at camp with nametags in his clothes, and in a phone call pretending to
be a gentleman rather than a gentleman’s gentleman, he manages to trick a
railroad clerk to tell him how and where a hobo might hop a freight. He knows he cannot dissuade McCrea from his
mission, but he does his best to pave the way for him.
We might like to know more about
the butler’s past that would make him so articulate on the subject of poverty,
but the story is McCrea’s, a well-meaning but essentially innocent and perhaps
even pompous man who discovers the grim world of Depression-era poverty in a
very personal way and learns to find his way back to the safety and blessed
relief of comedy.
Veronica Lake is his companion on
the trip, and as funny as the slapstick gets on their journey, it is
astoundingly interspersed with almost documentary-like scenes without dialogue
or narration of breadlines, crowded filthy flophouses, desperate Hoovervilles,
and soul-crushing chain gangs. Some scenes are reminiscent of The Grapes of
Wrath, and of I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
Comedy and tragedy, after dancing
around each other for a bit, finally intersect at the end of the film in a sweet,
sad, and gentle scene in a crude wooden southern Black church, led by minister
Jess Lee Brooks, a figure of dignity and nobleness of spirit. After services, they are to have the special
treat of showing a film and have invited the inmates of the local prison to
join them. The preacher reminds his
flock, “Neither by word, action, nor by look to make our guests feel unwelcome,
nor draw away from them, nor act high with them, for we’s all equal in the
sight of God.” The prisoners, shackled,
file in – McCrea among them, who has been mistakenly arrested for murder—as
preacher Brooks sings in his majestic bass voice, “Let My People Go.”
The oil lamps on the wall sconces
are turned down, and the projector is started up, and a Mickey Mouse cartoon
featuring Pluto, who struggles with flypaper stuck to him, entertains the
congregation and their guests. McCrea observes the pleased reaction of everyone
around him, how they laugh, and finds himself laughing. He has discovered the magic of comedy in the war
against poverty. Real-life director Sturges is far more successful than
fictional director McCrea, for he has managed to combine tragedy and comedy in
a way that validates both and trivializes neither.
The butler and valet are not
present at Joel McCrea’s moment of epiphany.
We could not imagine them guffawing at Pluto with flypaper on his
tail. Perhaps they might have smirked
only slightly with disciplined propriety and uttered to their master in clipped
speech, “Very good, sir.”
*********
Jacqueline T. Lynch
is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress.
Singer. Star. and Memories
in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper
column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated
nationally.
