O Brother, Where Are Thou??


Don't panic. I'm not suddenly veering off on a tangent and embarking on a spontaneous Coen Brothers season, although yes, they did make a film called O Brother, Where Art Thou? in 2000. It's a very good film, and one that we screened exactly two years ago. 


The Coen Brothers were paying homage to the film that I am about to screen.

Most of you probably know by now that our current film series (Depression. Comedy.) celebrates films made during the very difficult years of the Great Depression.

At a time when people had no hope and no security, film-makers made the conscious decision to be a positive force in society. They didn't hit people over the head with heavy-handed parables of social ills and injustice (they didn't have to - everyone was living through it; they knew exactly how bad everything was). People went to the movies to feel better.

But don't just take my word for that.


Sullivan's Travels is a comic film-maker's apologia.

It tells the story of John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) a (fictional) film-maker whose films have enjoyed tremendous success, but who is now feeling guilty about making such light-hearted and trivial films at a time when so many in the country are suffering and struggling.


Much to his studio's dismay, he has decided to film a novel called O Brother, Where Are Thou? a heavy-handed tome about real lives in Depression-era America (nothing to do with The Grapes of Wrath. I don't know what made you say that).

When his producers convince him that he doesn't know anything about hardship and suffering in the real world, he decides to set out on an incognito journey of discovery, hoping to gain the experience he thinks he needs.


He gets an education all right, although not quite the one he was expecting...


Sullivan's Travels was written and directed by Preston Sturges, who by 1941 had established himself as one of Hollywood's preeminent comic film-makers. This film is his graduate thesis.


By 1941, the Depression had been dragging on for a decade and although things were not as bad as they were in the early 30s, millions of people were still out of work and homeless. The war in Europe had already started, although the US had not yet jumped in (Sullivan's Travels received its press screening on the 4th of December; three days before the Pearl Harbor attack). 

Wave after wave of refugees had been arriving in the US (and in Hollywood specifically) with horror stories about the situation in Europe and a few loud voices in the media were insisting that this was the wrong time for comedy and escapism.

Sturges' message (which was shared by the general public, if box office receipts were any indication) was that this was exactly the time for comedy. 

At a time of suffering and hardship, when so many people had nothing, escapism was not a dirty word. Escapism was a lifeline; it was the way millions of people held on to their humanity at a time when everything else was being taken away from them.


Preston Sturges understood this. And John L. Sullivan learns it over the course of the film.


We will be screening Sullivan's Travels at 7.30 on Thursday, the 7th of March at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Wife in Every Room

Image
In Bringing Up Baby , Cary Grant became the first person to use the word Gay (in its modern sense) in a Hollywood movie. One might hypothesize that by 1938, the film censors were starting to become more permissive about the subtext that was regularly being slipped into films of the era. One would be completely wrong to thusly hypothesize ( to hypothesize thusly ; excuse me). Film censorship in the late 1930s was just as draconian as ever: a year earlier they had insisted that a shot of a  gravestone  be cut from a film because the character in question had committed suicide, and it was "inappropriate" to show her receiving a proper burial. The word gay had only slipped through in Bringing Up Baby because no one at the Hays Office knew what it meant in that context. (I won't tell them if you don't.) Cary Grant certainly knew what it meant, and it's very interesting that he was the one who got to introduce the word to American film audiences. Because Cary Grant, th
Read more

The calla lilies are in bloom again...

Image
At the beginning of last week's film, Ellen Wagstaff Arden has been lost at sea (missing; presumed dead) while engaged as the photographer for an anthropological expedition to Indo-China. While that back-story was obviously developed to establish the premise of the entire film (that she returns after a long absence to find her husband re-married) it is, I think, very notable that her character is shown to have a successful  career . Irrespective of the fact that she is supposed to be married with two young children, the (husband-and-wife) writers of My Favorite Wife saw no conflict in depicting a female character who had a life and a vocation that extended beyond her identity as merely wife and mother. Women in the 1930s were generally seen as people . They were allowed to have ambitions and aspirations that extended beyond "finding a man" and "becoming a mother". It was in the post-war years that mainstream society explicitly attempted to re-define womanhood a
Read more
Image
  Movie Nights at the  Victoria Park Baptist Church And so life goes on. Some of you may remember that our film series in early 2020 was rudely interrupted by a Global Pandemic. The subsequent year and a half has been, well... You know things are pretty bad when you find yourself wondering if there is a plural for "Apocalypse". But at any rate, here we are ( Apocalypses? Apocali? That's going to bother you now, isn't it?) facing the prospect of attempting to pick up the pieces of Civilisation - assuming of course we don't go into another Lockdown first. ( Apocalyae?   Apocalim? ) Movie-going, like so many communal activities, has taken a severe hit during the Pandemic, and I'm willing to hazard a guess that most of the films you have watched over the last eighteen months have been from the comfort of home, with, at most, a family member or two. But watching a film like this: ....isn't really the same as watching a film like this : Sadly we don't quite
Read more

We re-visit stage comedy (in more ways than one) on Thursday the 7th of October

Image
 We are continuing with the "stage comedy" theme next Thursday, after last week's screening of The Importance of Being Earnest. Noises Off began life as a stage comedy which premiered in London's West End in 1982. It is a farce about a farce, which presumably makes it a meta-farce.  This meta-farcical comedy(!) centres around a company of actors rehearsing (and then performing) a play (entitled Nothing On ) which becomes increasingly incoherent as the story progresses.  The original stage version is a merciless (and painfully funny) analysis of just how a farce works - or doesn't work, as the case may be. The film adaptation cranks things up a notch by attempting to film the staging of... the staging of a farce (a meta-meta-farce?) and in the process shows just how difficult it can be to translate a stage play to the screen.  While the film may not be 100% successful, it does manage to be one of the funniest things you will ever see (the first time I saw it, I la
Read more

Down With... Architecture!??

Image
  Okay, folks, this one is just plain bonkers. We've had a month or so of fairly heavy films that tackle some difficult topics (Evolution; Witch-burning; Segregation; Rape.. nice, uncontentious subjects) so it's about time we pause for some refreshment. The rest of March is going to be fun, fun, fun. Say hello to Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand was born in Russia to a well-educated, upper-middle class Jewish family. The October Revolution of 1917 brought her comfortable childhood to a very sudden and violent end (she was twelve at the time) and her family lost absolutely everything. By the time she was able to travel to the United States in 1926, she had cultivated what was to become a life-long visceral hatred for Communism, or indeed for any remotely collectivist philosophy. She wasn't merely opposed to the Soviet Union (which you can sort of understand, given what happened to her family); she was violently opposed to any obligations that might be imposed upon the individual for the b
Read more