SEINFELD BLOG

Sullivan's Travels - Criterion Collection

Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
Brand: Image Entertainment
EAN: 9781559409193
Format: Black & White, DVD-Video, Special Edition, NTSC
ISBN: 1559409193
Label: Criterion
Manufacturer: Criterion
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Criterion
Region Code: 1
Release Date: August 21, 2001
Running Time: 90 minutes
Sales Rank: 30220
Studio: Criterion
Theatrical Release Date: 1941-12

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Editorial Review:

Description:
This masterpiece by Preston Sturges is perhaps the finest movie-about-a-movie ever made. Hollywood director Joel McCrea, tired of churning out lightweight comedies, decides to make O Brother, Where Art Thou-a serious, socially responsible film about human suffering. After his producers point out that he knows nothing of hardship, he hits the road as a hobo. He finds the lovely Veronica Lake-and more trouble than he ever dreamed of.

Amazon.com essential video:
Writer-director Preston Sturges's third feature, 1941's Sullivan's Travels, remains the antic auteur's most ambitious screen effort. Having added the producer's stripe to his duties, Sturges combines breezy romantic comedy, arch Hollywood satire, and social essay into a single, screwball story line.

The titular pilgrim is John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), an Ivy League grad who's enjoyed a meteoric rise as the director behind escapist movies like Ants in Your Pants of 1938, but is now determined to raise his sights toward more exalted, serious-minded cinematic art. His proposed breakthrough, portentously titled O Brother, Where Art Thou?, elicits a studio response closer to 'Oh, brother,' given the director's utter lack of first-hand experience on the wrong side of the tracks.

Instead of capitulating, Sullivan sets off disguised as a tramp, ready to meet life's crueler lessons face-to-face--albeit followed at a discreet distance by a motor home filled with studio handlers and reporters. His ludicrous odyssey may give the boy director no real insight, but it gives Sturges the chance to inject some reliably fine gags and a romantic subplot featuring the luminous Veronica Lake. It's at this juncture that Sturges the writer's darker objective throws a jolting shift in tone. Suffice it to say that just when a comic, upbeat denouement seems imminent, Sullivan travels instead from the sunlit California of the comedy's early reels toward a darker, relentlessly downbeat world influenced more by the social realism of the movies the hero desperately wants to make. By the final reel, Sturges has flirted with real tragedy, turning his conclusion into a meditation on his own seemingly carefree, dizzily comic art. --Sam Sutherland




Rating: - Great Film by Great Film Director!
This is a wonderful film which was the basis for O'Brother, Where Art Thou? by the Coen Brothers years ... Read More

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Rating: - Farce, Satire, and Despair: An Unexpected and Remarkable Film
Preston Sturges (1898-1959) had a long career, but he was on a roll in the early 1940s, and he is best ... Read More

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Rating: - Laughter is the Best Medicine
There was a period during the 1940's when everything Preston Sturges touched was wildly successful with ... Read More

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Rating: - I didn't care for it.
I watch movies for entertainment and I did not find this movie that entertaining. Yes, I'm sure it made ... Read More

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Rating: - Absolutely awesome.
Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges, 1942)

Sullivan's Travels is one of the movies I'd never ... Read More

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Copyright ©2003, Mark Carey.