The comedies of Preston Sturges, part 2: Sullivan's Travels and The Palm Beach Story

This is a continuation of The comedies of Preston Sturges, part 1: The Great McGinty to The Lady Eve.

Sullivan's Travels (filmed May - July 1941, released January 1942)

Sullivan (Joel McCrea) and The Girl (Veronica Lake) on the road in Sullivan's Travels. Image source: Arrow Video Deck

According to Preston Sturges' biographer Diane Jacobs, the idea for Sullivan's Travels may have been based on an experience from his first years in Hollywood. Doing research for a film, screenwriter John Huston and director William Wyler spent time traveling as hobos and sleeping in L.A. flophouses, and Sturges had joined his friends for a night or two. In writing Sullivan's Travels (the first of his 1940s films not based on an older script) he may also have been taking stock of his recent success and trying to justify the frivolous activity of making comedies at a time of continued joblessness (the official U.S. unemployment rate in 1940 was 15%) and global war.

John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) is the director of hit musical comedies like So Long Sarong, Hey, Hey in the Hayloft and Ants in Your Plants of 1939. (These titles, absurd as they are, all reference actual movies: So Long Sarong alludes to Road to Singapore (1940), the latest of Dorothy Lamour's "sarong" pictures; Hey, Hey is a dig at the "let's put on a show in the barn" scenes of Babes in Arms (1939); and Ants in Your Plants parodies the Broadway Melody series. Sturges knew the latter intimately: he'd written the screenplay for the unproduced Broadway Melody of 1939 and also contributed dialogue to Broadway Melody of 1940.) [1]

Sullivan decides that musicals are too trivial: his next project will be a gritty film about poverty and injustice called O Brother, Where Art Thou? But first he has to convince his producers Hadrian and LeBrand (Porter Hall and Robert Warwick).

SULLIVAN: I want this picture to be a commentary on modern conditions. Stark realism. The problems that confront the average man.
LEBRAND: But with a little sex.
SULLIVAN: A little, but I don't want to stress it. I want this picture to be a document. I want to hold a mirror up to life. I want this to be a picture of dignity—a true canvas of the suffering of humanity.
LEBRAND: But with a little sex.
SULLIVAN: With a little sex in it.
HADRIAN: How about a nice musical?
SULLIVAN: How can you talk about musicals at a time like this, with the world committing suicide? With corpses piling up in the street, with grim death gargling at you from every corner, with people slaughtered like sheep!
HADRIAN: Maybe they'd like to forget that.

The producers are skeptical, and instead offer him Ants in Your Plants of 1941.

SULLIVAN: . . .But you don't realize conditions have changed. There isn't any work. There isn't any food. These are troublous times.
HADRIAN: What do you know about trouble?
SULLIVAN: What do I know about trouble?
HADRIAN: Yes, what do you know about trouble?. . .You want to make a picture about garbage cans—what do you know about garbage cans? When did you eat your last meal out of one?
SULLIVAN: What's that got to do with it?. . .Don't you think I've—
HADRIAN: No.
SULLIVAN: What?
HADRIAN: You have not.
SULLIVAN: . . .I suppose you're trying to tell me I don't know what trouble is.
HADRIAN: Yes!
LEBRAND: In a nice way, Sully.
SULLIVAN: You're absolutely right. I haven't any idea what it is.
HADRIAN: People always like what they don't know anything about.
SULLIVAN: I had a lot of nerve wanting to make a picture about human suffering. . .But I'll tell you what I'm gonna do first. I'm going down to Wardrobe to 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. [2]

He will get more trouble than he bargained for. But first he needs to get out of town, which proves surprisingly hard to do. First he has to shake the huge mobile trailer carrying a support and publicity crew that his producers send to follow him around. Then he has to dodge a lonely widow who has designs on this handsome vagrant. And finally he meets The Girl (Veronica Lake in her first starring role), an aspiring actress giving up on her dreams and leaving Hollywood for good. At first she insists on buying him breakfast, and then (when he reveals his true identity, and his plan) on accompanying him on his journey. The two hop freight trains, stand in line at soup kitchens, sleep in barns huddled together against the cold, and fall in love.

After a while Sullivan is ready to return to Hollywood, settle down with The Girl and make his movie. But then an act of violence separates him from his old life and identity. Now he experiences brutality and suffering first-hand, but also the unexpected kindness and generosity of strangers, and the redemptive power of laughter.

Both McCrea and Lake do some of their best work in this film. Diane Jacobs interviewed McCrea, and learned that before filming began Sturges told McCrea that he'd written the part of Sullivan just for him. McCrea's response: "What do you mean? They don't write scripts for me. They write them for Gary Cooper, and if they can't get him, they take me." [3]

But Sturges was apparently sincere, and the two got along well; McCrea would go on to star in two more of Sturges' movies. Sturges also had Veronica Lake in mind early on. At the time she was a virtual unknown; he'd spotted her in the rushes of a Mitchell Leisen-directed film called I Wanted Wings, which hadn't even been released when Sullivan's Travels began filming. But Sturges wanted an actress who would be convincing as someone who'd failed to make it, and casting an already-famous actress in the part would have undermined the necessary suspension of disbelief. [4]

Sullivan's Travels is not a perfect movie. Early in the film there is a chase scene in which Sullivan hitches a ride on a go-cart driven by a 12-year-old in an attempt to escape his minders in the trailer. First, a white motorcycle cop gets his face splashed with dark mud; a minute later, when the trailer attempts to pursue Sullivan down dirt roads and across fields, the black cook (Charles R. Moore) is painfully jounced around and winds up first suspended by his neck from a hole in the roof, and then with his face planted in the pancake batter. Eighty years on, the jokes ring hollow: if images of a black man dangling by his neck, a white man in blackface, or a black man in whiteface were ever funny to white or black audiences, they aren't any longer. And Sullivan's final speech comes uncomfortably close to the Hollywood complacency and self-congratulation that the rest of the film satirizes. But Sullivan's Travels is full of Sturges' trademark snappy dialogue and has many memorable scenes, both comic and otherwise.

And it has been an inspiration to many later filmmakers, not least to the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen. In 2000 they wrote and directed an homage to Sullivan's Travels entitled O Brother, Where Art Thou? Like Sullivan's Travels, it's got brutality, suffering, chain gangs, and also snappy dialogue, chase scenes and slapstick—and a little sex.

The Palm Beach Story (filmed November 1941 - January 1942, released December 1942)

Tom (Joel McCrea), Maude (Mary Astor), Gerry (Claudette Colbert), and J.D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee) in The Palm Beach Story. Image source: Pinterest

During the filming of The Palm Beach Story Pearl Harbor was attacked and the U.S. entered World War II. But no hint of the unfolding global catastrophe appears in Sturges' movie, which feels like a throwback to the café comedies of the early sound era. It even features Rudy Vallee, Jazz Age radio heartthrob, and its lead actresses (Claudette Colbert and Mary Astor) had both starred in silent films.

Perhaps as an homage, The Palm Beach Story (originally titled Is Marriage Necessary?) opens with a sequence without dialogue. A woman, dressed only in a slip and bound and gagged, struggles to escape from a locked closet. Another woman who looks just like the first pulls on a wedding dress and veil and runs off to a church, where moments later her equally agitated groom dashes up. As they stand breathless before the altar a title card appears onscreen: "And They Lived Happily Ever After. . .Or Did They?" [5]

Cut to five years later. Tom and Gerry Jeffers (Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert) are living in a vast Park Avenue apartment. But their apparent success is all for show: Tom's been unable to interest any investors in his latest scheme, an airfield made of steel mesh suspended over the center of the city. (It's a terrible idea; a plane crash would shower flaming debris onto the buildings and streets below.) They're months behind on the rent, and the landlord has begun showing their place to prospective tenants.

The first of whom is the millionaire Wienie King (Robert Dudley), inventor of the Texas Wienie. When he learns about Gerry's distress, he peels a few bills off of his enormous bankroll for the back rent, plus a new dress and hat. It's not what you think: the Wienie King is old enough to be Gerry's father and, despite that, isn't interested in dating her. As Gerry tells her highly suspicious husband, "You have no idea what a long-legged gal can do without doing anything." [6]

The Wienie King just wants to help a pretty lady, and Gerry isn't too proud to take the money. She pays the rent, buys a new dress and hat, and, now penniless again, leaves Tom and heads to Palm Beach. Their love for one another is irrelevant, in Gerry's mind: Tom can find a new wife who can cook and deal with other domestic duties; she'll find a rich new husband who can give her the life of luxury she wants, and as a side benefit can fund Tom's schemes.

At the train station the ticketless Gerry is adopted by the "Ale & Quail Club," a group of shotgun-toting hunters going down to Florida to massacre some wildlife. Fleeing the over-boisterous A&Q Club Gerry winds up in a sleeper car, where, as she's climbing into an empty upper berth, she introduces herself to the passenger in the lower berth by inadvertently stepping on his face and breaking his pince-nez. That passenger is the multimillionaire J.D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee), who is instantly enamoured. He invites Gerry to leave the train with him at Jacksonville and sail down to Palm Beach on his yacht. Ever the pragmatist, Gerry accepts.

But when they arrive in Palm Beach they are greeted not only by Hackensacker's much-married sister Maude (Mary Astor) but by Tom, who has gotten the money to fly down from the soft-hearted Wienie King. Quick-thinking Gerry passes Tom off as her brother. Maude is immediately intrigued and sets her sights on Tom, despite the inconvenient presence of her current lover Toto (Sig Arno). But Gerry's continuing love for and attraction to her husband threatens to derail her carefully laid plans to promote his success by marrying someone else.

The character of Gerry was based in part on Sturges' own mother Mary, who always relied on the kindness of (rich, male) strangers as she accompanied her friend Isadora Duncan around Europe. Tom seems to be a version of Sturges, who was himself an inventor. And J.D. Hackensacker III is a more benign and likeable version of J.D. Rockefeller III, although he shares his penchant for parsimony in small things (like the economical sleeper berth and the ten-cent tip he gives the disappointed Pullman porter (Charles R. Moore)).

But The Palm Beach Story's humor is sometimes negated by racist and xenophobic stereotypes. Fred Toones plays a fearful bartender on the train who is compelled to toss objects in the air for the A&Q Club's live-ammunition target practice; somehow it's hard to find amusement at the sight of a black man cowering before a gang of white men with shotguns and hunting dogs. And Sig Arno's nonsense-language vaudeville routine relies on the idea that foreigners are inherently hilarious. Nitz, as Toto would say.

The Palm Beach Story was admired by other filmmakers, and in particular by Sturges' friend Billy Wilder. Almost 20 years later Wilder reworked some of its scenes in another brilliant comedy. Some Like It Hot also features an overnight train trip to Florida and the overcrowding of a Pullman berth: in The Palm Beach Story, the Ale & Quail Club's pack of hounds leap into Hackensacker's bed while pursuing Gerry, once again breaking his pince-nez; in Some Like It Hot, negligee-wearing singer Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe) and her entire pajama-clad all-girl jazz band climb in with a thrilled but alarmed "Daphne" (bass player Jerry (Jack Lemmon), who has joined the band dressed in drag). In Some Like It Hot there are also unexpected meetings with multi-millionaires: Sugar Kane is wooed by a bespectacled yachtsman who talks like Cary Grant and hints that he is the heir to the Shell Oil fortune (although he's really broke saxophonist Joe (Tony Curtis), travelling with the band as "Josephine"), while "Daphne" is relentlessly pursued by the super-rich Osgood Fielding III (Joe E. Brown), who won't take no for an answer.

Wilder made no secret of his admiration for The Palm Beach Story. But critics and audiences were cool to Sturges' film, perhaps because its focus on the idle rich seemed jarringly out of touch with the wartime mood. With the distance of time, and if you can make allowances for its objectionable scenes, The Palm Beach Story's dialogue and the performances of Colbert, McCrea, Vallee and Astor are very enjoyable: I would put it in third place among Sturges' movies, after The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels. But its relative lack of success, coupled with studio belt-tightening and the change of national mood due to the war, meant that Sturges would have to think on a smaller scale for his next two films.

Next time: The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero

Last time: The Great McGinty, Christmas in July and The Lady Eve

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1. Sturges was a boxing fan, and John L. Sullivan was a famous 19th-century heavyweight champion.
2. Quotes from the film transcribed from the 2001 Criterion Collection DVD. And yes, I hear (and subtitles confirm) Ants in Your Plants, not Ants in Your Pants. Sturges may have been making a concession to the Hays/Breen Office.
3. Diane Jacobs, Christmas in July: The Life and Art of Preston Sturges, University of California Press, 1992, p. 254.
4. Speaking of suspension of disbelief: when Lake reported for costume fittings before the start of filming it turned out that she was nearly six months' pregnant. Sturges was furious at her concealment of her pregnancy during casting. But costume designer Edith Head hid her condition beneath trenchcoats, empire-waisted bathrobes and baggy hobo suits, and Sturges hired actress and former Rose Parade Queen Cheryl Walker as a body double for the physically rigorous scenes of freight-hopping and pool-dunking. Although I've watched Sullivan's Travels at least half a dozen times, I had never suspected Lake's pregnancy before reading Jacobs' biography. Lake gave birth to a daughter, Elaine, on 21 August 1941, just six weeks after shooting wrapped on Sullivan's Travels.
5. This sequence is never fully explained. At the end of the film—spoiler alert!—we learn that both the bride and groom have identical twins, who, five years later, are still single. One story that suggests itself is that Tom Jeffers has unknowingly married the wrong twin; but then, why was he running up to the church as if he'd also left his brother bound and gagged? And if both twins are "wrong" and have just usurped their siblings' marriage ceremony, why doesn't the original couple just go ahead and get married once they escape from their closets? No explanation seems fully satisfactory; as Tom says, "That's another plot entirely."
6. Quoted in Jacobs, p. 271.