***Tales of the Class Struggle, Part Two-With Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels In Mind

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Sullivan’s Travels, starring Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake, directed by Preston Sturges, 1941

Scene: The times, the tail end of the Great Depression times (the 1930s one not the more recent one), sent a lot of things topsy-turvy, set a lot of people who were complacent and well-healed to thinking that something should be done about something (all the while enjoying their something without missing a beat). Take this guy Joel Sullivan, yah, Joel Sullivan the great comedic film director, the guy who got famous in a hurry with the film All That Stuff. One day, out of the blue, Joel developed a conscience or maybe he had one, undeveloped, and a quick look around got him thinking that the way the world was going to hell in a hand-basket that he ought to do something about it. Of course a guy who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, a guy who started life on third base and thought that was where the starting line was for everybody, would be hard pressed to figure out what was to be done since all he knew was dough and making dough doing silly movies. Then he came up with the bright idea that he had to immerse himself among the dregs of society, down there on skid row, down there in the in the tramp, hobo, bum railroad jungles, down there on the mean streets of broken dreams to get a feel for life.

And so he did, so he did against great opposition from his fleet of film advisors, against his financial advisers and, well, against his woman. Of course no Mayfair swell was going to travel the mean street of Hollywood, (oops) the mean streets of Depression America alone. Certainly not when you can have a fetching woman with blond hair stumbling and fumbling over her right eye like his latest paramour Veronica, Veronica Smith, who despite her fetchingness was strictly from cheap street and knew a ton of stuff about those streets of broken dreams. So with Veronica in tow they were off, off to find the soul of the American hard times.

Hard times at every turn, hard times down at the railroad sidings, hard times in the Sally’s (Salvation Army of blessed memory) flop houses, hard times in the soup kitchens, hard times, well, just hard times all around. And our brother of the road Joel can’t quite figure out what he could do about it, except to make films, socially redeeming films not that tinsel town fluff he had been spewing forth. Then things went a little haywire for the suffering brother. He left his Veronica back in some Podunk town to keep her out of harm’s, some place where no hobos need stop and went off on his own. Went off to find the great hobo night.

And our boy found it, found out what it was like to go hungry a few days when even the soup lines were empty, when he found himself between towns and had to sleep out in the open, when he found out that the hobo camps were not places of good fellowship where kindred took care of each other. He learned that the hard way when one night he had his serviceable walkable shoes stolen from right off his feet and he was left bare-footed for a while and one another night when he was jack-rolled for the dollar and change he had in his pockets. Veronica, nobody, ever told him, ever could tell him except those who had been there, there in the depths, that down at the edges of society life ain’t pretty. Life is every man for himself and that is the facts jack, straight up. So it came as no surprise, although it brought Veronica nothing but sadness for years afterward, when they found Joel Sullivan, yah, Joel Sullivan the great boy film director face down in some dry riverbed out in Kansas beaten almost to a pulp a few weeks after he set off on his great adventure.

Now some film director, some real movie guy, someone who knew about how to make a pleasing movie out of Joel’s’ adventures might have had Joel and Veronica immerged in hobo life as a lark, might have even had them flea-bitten, hungry, sleeping in some low-life jungle camp, and then miraculously transformed back in the good life like in some fairy tale. And that might in fact make a very spiffy movie especially if it was cast right. But out there in the mean streets, out there on the edge, out there at the tip of the class struggle that would not play, would not draw a laugh.