Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms.
Bringing some of the older AFI movies into a modern context has been quite challenging. Sometimes our general world views change, sometimes the chief antagonist is dated. Sometimes the storytelling just belongs to a different era. The better ones focus on something abstract, and 1941’s Sullivan’s Travel’s (1941) is not only one of the better ones–It is a great one.
To set the stage, Sullivan (Joel McCrae) is an up-and-coming movie director who just screened his new neo-noir film to his producers, but despite the approval from his bosses, he feels unfulfilled creatively. He pitches to them an idea for his next project: a hard-hitting but sympathetic portrayal of life in poverty. The producers are not as keen on this. Musicals and screw-ball comedies are much more profitable and audiences are just looking for some escape as the War wages on overseas. From their perspective, audiences are not interested some rich kid’s takes on what it means to be poor (and honestly, fair point).
Sullivan takes this criticism and decides he needs to gain some perspective in life. In doing so, he throws on some tattered clothing and prepares to leave off the grid. However, just before leaving for his journey, he is confronted by his butler who vehemently disagrees with this endeavor on both ethical and practical grounds. He illustrates to Sullivan that along with poverty comes desperation and a general lack of concern or care the government has about the desperately poor or the violence a drifter is capable of. He drives the point home with an anecdote of two friends who went out for a walk in a similar place and were never heard from again.
Sullivan presses on however. He ends up with a job as a farm hand (briefly) before getting chased right back to his own town. He finds himself at a diner where The Girl, a struggling actress,(Veronica Lake), takes pity on him and buys him some food believing him to be a hobo. As a return for her kindness, Sullivan takes her back to the mansion (eventually) and they get caught up in some screwball comedy hijinks.
After this, The Girl and Sullivan go back on Sullivan’s mission to see the underclass. There is a gravitation that Los Angeles holds over these characters as they are constantly pulled back despite their best efforts to leave who they were behind.
It’s interesting to see a riches-to-rags story shot like this and with this level of sensitivity towards those in rags. Ultimately, this film is a bit of a time capsule. It’s a reminder of what life was like just after the end of The Great Depression. Not everyone had gotten out of squaller. Some were sent overseas to fight a war. And those who had managed to move out of the Depression (one way or another) maybe weren’t interested in revisiting the pain, but that doesn’t mean the exercise is a pointless one.
This movie is a bit dated, but worth the time.
90 Minutes
Available on Prime Rental
8.5/10
If you ain’t got the do, re, mi boys.
If you ain’t got the do, re mi,
Well, you better go back to beautiful Texas
Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee
California is a Garden of Eden
A paradise to live in or to see
But believe it or not,
You won’t find it so hot
If you ain’t got the do, re, mi
-Woody Guthrie
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