Preston Sturges Sullivans Travels O Brother Where Art Thou
Sullivan's Travels, the Preston Sturges movie from 1941, tells the story of John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), not the boxer, but a Hollywood director of highly successful low-cal comedies. He is determined to alter his epitome by adapting a ponderous social-message novel entitled O Brother, Where Fine art 1000?
Sullivan'due south Travels is one of those all-time archetype films that critics beloved and students detest, at to the lowest degree on starting time bounce. They notice information technology schizophrenic. It starts off with several slapstick scenes worthy of early on Chaplin. The plot then twists itself into a precipitous 1930's screwball one-act, similar Capra without the sentimentality. Just every bit the couple begin to realize that they are in beloved, the motion picture turns badly nighttime. Sullivan is robbed and most killed. Suffering from amnesia, he is bedevilled of attempted murder and sentenced to a chain gang. Isolated in a swampland prison and tormented by sadistic guards, Sullivan hits bottom. His friends believe he is expressionless. Ane night Sullivan sees an early on Disney cartoon, realizes his identity and the value of his life as an entertainer. Miraculously, he regains his liberty and The Daughter (Veronica Lake). Presto! The obligatory Hollywood happy ending.
Students don't quite know how to react. Is this a comedy with a grim interlude that ruins the fun? Or is it a serious reflection on a world poised midway between Low and war that compromises its message by going for laughs? Or is it in fact an insightful mirror of man life, where comedy and tragedy routinely mingle unpredictably like raucous jokes at an Irish wake? It takes time and multiple viewings to be able to take the third possible interpretation.
O Brother, Where Fine art Thou? proclaims in an opening title that it is based on Homer's The Odyssey. Possibly, but by choosing the title they did, the writers, Joel and Ethan Coen, have in fact given Sullivan'southward Travels equal billing. The event of this intermillennial collaboration of Homer, Sturges and the Coens is a highly entertaining mix of comedy and tragedy. Like Homer they bounciness the narrative from one episode to some other with piddling to hold them together beyond the presence of the wandering hero and his clownish companions. Similar Sturges they move the emotions in opposite directions with startling suddenness, an effect that both confuses and exhilarates.
In this film, the Coens match the delightful tension they created in Fargo (1996), in which the achingly funny characters brand united states forget that the plot is beingness propelled by a barbarous kidnapping and a series of murders past a couple of psychopathic killers. In Fargo they brilliantly caricature the linguistic communication and manners of Norwegian-American Minnesota. In the present film, they take careful satiric aim on rural Southern grotesques but place them in a world of racism, abuse, lynch mobs and dispiriting poverty. It's Faulkner with the giggles.
Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), a Depression-era Odysseus from Mississippi, begins his journey domicile after escaping from a chain gang with two comic sidekicks, Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson), neither of whom has e'er been invited to join Mensa. Wily Ulysses speaks in paragraphs, like a human who makes Roget'due south Thesaurus his bedside reading merely has never heard of Elements of Style. With his razor-abrupt mustache and hair carefully set up and perfumed with Dapper Dan pomade, he could have walked out of a 1920'southward Arrow neckband ad or silent movie set. He might even exist mistaken for a managing director, like John L. Sullivan himself. Pete and Delmar have the style consciousness of a dog's supper.
Nonetheless, the three are inseparable, initially because of the metallic wonders of prison technology. As their journeying continues, however, the bond becomes spiritual. Ulysses has 1 goal in mind: to return to his pretty wife, Penny (Holly Hunter), and his seven daughters. Penny, however, is not quite the stick-calm that Homer'due south Penelope was. No weaving and unweaving to keep off unwanted suitors for her. After all, she has to do for her girls, and for Penny.
O Blood brother, Where Art Yard? relies heavily on a haunting musical score woven together from an astonishing variety of traditional country spirituals and ballads. At times the activeness stops entirely to allow u.s. to enjoy the wonderful sounds without distraction, much like the song-and-trip the light fantastic toe numbers in classic M.K.M. musicals. In one lovely scene, worthy of Fellini, the trio happens upon a congregation clad in white gowns, men and women both, singing every bit they process through the forest toward a river for a mass baptism. For these convicts, this is a vision of heaven.
In another scene they encounter the Sirens, a trio of lovely young women washing clothes in the middle of the aforementioned river. Every bit men who accept non been near a woman in several years, they find their a-cappella vocal captivating. Homer, brilliant as always, stressed the siren'south song rather than her appearance, and the Coens wisely follow his lead.
Opposite the angelic strains of the spirituals and ballads is the lowdown sound of Delta blues. The wayfarers meet a immature blackness guitarist, Tommy Johnson (Chris Thomas King), who claims to have sold his soul to the devil in substitution for musical skill. The devil certainly kept his side of the deal. In another of his mad schemes, Ulysses leads this interracial quartet into a country radio studio and introduces them to the bullheaded station managing director as the Soggy Bottom Boys, an all-white or all-blackness group, depending. With the race issue thus settled, they get the chore and perform with such gusto that they become the rage of the Yazoo Valley from Greenwood to Redwood and every woods in betwixt.
As fugitives one stride alee of the sheriff's shotgun and bloodhounds, the Soggy Bottoms cannot cash in on their new-constitute notoriety. Always on the lam, they brand an unscheduled invitee advent every bit supporting players in a bank robbery with George Nelson (Michael Badalucco). During the transaction, they find that it is quite unhealthy to use his more popular name Baby Face, at least while he'due south signing his withdrawal slip with a tommy gun.
They also stumble into an adventure with the Cyclops, Large Dan Teague (John Goodman), a beefy, one-eyed Bible salesman who may take taken lessons in theology and business organisation ideals from Elmer Gantry. Like his namesake in The Odyssey, Ulysses provides a banquet for Large Dan, but this fourth dimension the Wily One lets the Wide Ane win the start circular. Non to worry. They will meet once again.
Through a series of wild improbabilities, Ulysses and his buddies become fundamental figures in the entrada for the re-election of Gov. Menelaus Pappy O'Neill (Charles Durning), a public retainer totally dedicated to the service of Pappy O'Neill. His challenger, Homer Stokes (Wayne Duval), seems to accept the election sewn up tighter than a Broward Canton ballot box. For some foreign reason, Homer decides to solidify his standing amidst members of a certain unnamed secret order past arranging the gratuitous lynching of the black guitarist from the Soggy Bottom Boys. This miscalculation wilts his kudzu in a bustle. The Soggies will not abandon their friend, and when they spot a white hood with only one eye hole, they pursue their mission with a zeal that could have stopped Sherman dead.
In the 1930'southward, the ghosts of Full general Sherman and his boys in blueish still haunt the landscape, just as today the night flow of Low and Jim Crow however haunt the country, N and South alike. Roger Deakins, director of photography, frequently captures this dark atmosphere past haemorrhage the color from the screen, turning the images into sepia-tones, like those stark photographs of Dorothea Lange. Even these subtle changes in color tone accentuate the tension betwixt the sunny world of comedy and the twilight regions of personal tragedy.
George Clooney, as Ulysses, radiates irrepressible optimism in the direst of circumstances. He protects himself from his world with a shell of words, not particularly witty or wise words, simply a relentless chatter to convince himself with a Gablesque wink and smirk that frankly, he doesn't give a damn nearly today, because tomorrow will be a meliorate day with a cherry-red sunrise. John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson, as his sidekicks, practice a scrap too much mugging for the camera, merely they are, later all, picture show stereotypes of Hollywood hillbillies, intended more as a parody of the movies than of rural Southerners.
In a blatant parody of all those mindless Hollywood movies scorned past the Sullivan of Travels fame, the Coen brothers stretch to bring all the strands of their story together in an outrageously unlikely final sequence. Whatever self-respecting deus would climb back into his machina and become home in embarrassment. Information technology's a fact, however, that everyone who wants to sell tickets in this business has to provide a happy catastrophe, not a successful lynching. Who cares if the catastrophe is unconvincing? The whole movie is a great wild comic ride, a care for for center and ear alike. John L. Sullivan would take loved it. And so would Preston Sturges. And so would their studio bosses.
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Source: https://www.americamagazine.org/issue/342/film-review/wily-brothers