Sullivan’s Travels

Director: Preston Sturges

Hollywood director John L. Sullivan sets out to experience life as a homeless person in order to gain relevant life experience for his next movie. (IMDB)

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Directors: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

In the deep south during the 1930s, three escaped convicts search for hidden treasure while a relentless lawman pursues them. (IMDB)

This being the first post on Movie Connections I’ll spend a small paragraph explaining what this will be about. The general idea is self-explanatory of course, it is going to be about connecting two or maybe more films together but the way the films are going to be connected is going to differ probably every time. Sometimes it could be theme, a common source of adaptation or something like today, more of a movie nerd thing! All of the times though it’s going to be about films I love in an attempt to suggest them to people that might not have seen them and bring them to their attention in an interesting way of seeing one with a companion film.

Sullivan’s Travels (1941) is one of my personal favourite films and a film that I believe is ideal for people who might be interested in watching old films and continuously postponing it because they think they might be dull or too… back and white, to see. This movie, written and directed by Preston Sturges, is a breath of fresh air and an actual roller-coaster of emotions as movie critics often say. The laughs are plenty and with sequences like the ‘church’ one I, at least, was touched in a way that I haven’t been from most modern films.

The plot follows a movie director, John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), who makes comedies and is not happy about it. He wants, as he makes clear to the studio boss, his next ‘picture to be a commentary on modern conditions. Stark realism. The problems that confront the average man.’  To add in with all seriousness, ‘with a little sex in it’. His ticket  to this new direction is to adapt a fictitious novel about the Great Depression called O Brother, Where Art Thou? by Sinclair Beckstein. Yes Beckstein not Steinbeck. This as you probably guessed is our movie connection but we’ll return to that in a bit.

Sullivan sets out, dressed as a bum, to find out first hand about the troubles of the people, only he has a small bus of assistants and butlers following him around despite his objection, to ensure his safety. On this outing and after trying to lose the bus he meets a failed actress, known as ‘the Girl’ (Veronica Lake), which despite being in no better condition than him and ready to return home after not making it in Hollywood, takes pity in him and buys him breakfast. When he offers to take her home with his car and another small adventure with the police, his trick is revealed and the Girl is upset with him for pretending to be poor. This is an important scene even if it seems unnecessary when you see it because it allows us to see how easy it is for him to get out of jail when the cops learn who he is. It also allows Sullivan to make a joke about his impoverished appearance to the officers, saying it is so because he just paid his taxes.

Oh, so you’re the washed up
director -The Girl

This is when the second outing happens along with the Girl, dressed as a boy, where they eat at a soup kitchen and sleep at a homeless shelter. To make a long story short and leave some juice for those who might view this for a first time, this is when, after Sullivan decides this all was a mistake, he publicly takes out his money to give out to the homeless, a man attacks him and leaves him on a boxcar unconscious and without an ID.

And thus his actual ‘Odyssey’ begins. Police, now that he is a nobody, are not so kind to him, after a brawl he ends up in prison and sees how it is to be a poor guy with no agency in the world. And, most importantly, how a silly comedy may offer some much needed laughter, escape and mental rest to these people. I am referring of course to the church sequence where this is presented in a nuanced and meaningful way in one of the most moving scenes in any movie you will ever see. This isn’t something cheap that has to come as a result for the movie to have something to say, it is as natural as the kindness of the church folk welcoming the prisoners. The folk of course being black in one the best representation of them you can see in an
old film using the power of film as an art form to unite people.

And after all that and the happy ending for our characters, that the other director, Preston Sturges, knows he has to have, Sullivan thinks that he might not be doing the novel O Brother, Where Art Thou? after all. But worry not, where John L. Sullivan steps down the Coens step in. 

Almost sixty years after this small odyssey has ended, another is about to begin, and an odyssey written by Homer none the less. At least that is what the Coens claim. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) is written and directed of course by Ethan and Joel Coen and is another odyssey in small disguise, following Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) and two fellow convicts (John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson) in their effort to find a treasure after their escape from a chain gang. In the film you will see a form of the Sirens, the Cyclops Polyphemus, Ulysses’ wife waiting for him (or not) as another Penelope, blind prophet Tiresias introduced as nobody, characters that correspond to a number of ancient Greek gods and human transformation into frogs! This could have easily been a movie connection to any adaptation of the Odyssey but it would be to obvious.

Damn, we’re in a tight spot
-Ulysses Everett McGill

The movie is set, as our fictitious novel, during the Great Depression or even better as Wash Hogwallop apologetically says when he betrays the staring trio ‘They got this depression on’. Thus the Coens decide to make the movie John Sullivan did not. Or maybe, as I believe, they make the movie Sullivan would make if he eventually decided to do it. Contradictory to the novel’s stark realism about the problems of the average man, the Coens film follows the style of Sullivan’s Travels in lightness and in the use of comedy. This is the film J. Sullivan would have made after his experience in prison with the unfortunate victims of the Great Depression. This isn’t the Grapes of Wrath but the people then didn’t need to see it in a film, they lived it every day. So the Coens through our fictitious Sullivan decide to add some much needed levity to a very hard reality that people experience and don’t need a pretentious artist to tell them about.

If this might sound a bit to meta for you I get it but knowing the Coens work, this seems like a Tuesday morning for them. Their love and knowledge of film and constant use of other film references in their own is second to none.

The strongest connection between the two movies in question is the scene were our protagonists are watching a movie in a theatre when all of a sudden the projection stops and a bunch of chained prisoners are escorted in to watch along. This immediately brings to mind the church sequence I referenced earlier. The spirituality of this sequence though can also be seen in the baptism scene in the beginning of the adventure of our three heroes and is aesthetically similar to the entirety of the film thanks to the Southern locations and characters.

This scene though can be in essence be compared more correctly with the one in the end of O Brother where our protagonists perform their hit song ‘Man of constant sorrow’ in the campaign gala of Homer Stokes for Mississippi governor. They recorded this early in the film as the Soggy Bottom Boys with Tommy Johnson (Chris Thomas King) a black man they met on the road who supposedly sold his soul to the devil to play good guitar. Homer comes to point them out as the people who interfered with the lynching of Tommy from a certain secret society he belongs to but his constituency ain’t having it. They care more about the music they like and enjoy, even if it isn’t old-timey as is accused by their candidate who is eventually thrown off for the integrated music to continue, showing the power that entertainment has in connecting people of all races. The Coens being the Coens though, they have to show that this is recognized by another politician, the running governor of Mississippi, Menelaus “Pappy” O’Daniel, who was about to lose this election and takes advantage of this and supports the Boys and pardons them.

Countless other minor events in the Coens film mirror the Sturges one. Details scattered through out the film like a line you could easily miss in Sullivan by a minor character commenting on the protagonist’s adventure as it has more publicity than the Johnstown flood with the Coens movie ending in a big flood. More meaningful events include the film’s start with all three protagonists trying to hop on a freight car, something that Sullivan does with the Girl and later on Ulysses’ wife insists on the lie that he was hit by a train even when he is right there in front of her. Of course the thief who stole Sullivan’s clothes and ID was hit and killed by a train. Sullivan escapes the first bus with the valets and butlers with the help of a child driving a car as do the trio in O Brother escape from the law man in pursuit of them with the help of another kid with a car.

To conclude, if there are writers that could make a modern movie with witty dialogue like they did in Hollywood in the 40’s and make it work, these are the Coens. This movie, even if you don’t care about the connections with Sullivan’s Travels has all the charm you find in an old movie, if you love old movies and none of the pseudo-seriousness and stark realism of the modern ones. Okay, granted that I just explained two paragraphs ago that the Coens don’t leave it at the fact that music unites. It is now a tool of the government to control the people but they don’t hit you over the head with it as a true modern movie would that would owe its existence on the fact, it is also the tool that are heroes take the win and have a happy ending. Although now that I think about it, O Brother, Where Art Thou? Has already become an old movie. It is now twenty-four years old.

Parissis Panos