Sullivan's Travels

This movie wasn't really that good, let alone great.  Never fully committing to its idea, and offering only occasional glimpses of skill from Veronica Lake, it would be easy to write this off as a middling romantic comedy. Which is, of course, purposeful.  In the course of delivering on its explicit promise of lighthearted but meaningless entertainment, it not only manages to comment on the type of movie it purports to be, but also sneakily to be exactly the opposite.

The film's central conceit of making a lighthearted romantic comedy about making lighthearted romantic comedies is the earliest example I can think of what has now come to be termed" meta".  Such an idea is positively pedestrian nowadays, and a film that attacks it has to do rather a lot to justify its existence.  Insofar as Sullivan's Travels treads this ground decades in advance of any other, it can be forgiven for being occasionally unfocused or pedestrian.  It travels a lovely thematic arc from "movies should be meaningful and serious", through "that's not as easy as it seems, and is frankly pedantic and insulting", ending up at "maybe a pie in the face isn't such a bad thing after all".  At each step of this journey, it not only delivers the message, but at the same time is the message, its own form and tone displaying in the macro what it's purporting to say in the micro.  If it were a little more artfully or skillfully done, one might be tempted to call it literature.

But the real cleverness (the clumsiness of the execution standing in the way of calling it genius) of the film is that the opposite idea, that movies should "mean" something, runs in a countercurrent underneath the film even as it is being mocked.  The film portrays the title character with a laughable and oblivious white savior complex that is rooted in ego, rather than in empathy--a phenomenon that is all to familiar today.  But even as that caricature is exhaled, and the idea that such a director is to be mocked, writer/director Preston Sturges sneaks a real picture of injustice, hardship, and inequality under the inhalation.  It's quite postmodernist and sophisticated, and insofar as such a thing was done before "modern" was a thing, let alone "postmodern", it can be forgiven for its clumsy, and ultimately only marginally successful, attempt.