A raft of Hollywood film-makers are forsaking the likes of Austin Powers and The fabulous Spider-Man 2 for true stories about blacklisted communists and arms dealers in AfghanistanPreston Sturges’s immortal 1941 Sullivan’s Travels fulfils its own premise brilliantly. Its hero,John Sullivan (Joel McCrea), is an archetypal Hollywood hack, and purveyor of racy comedies such as Hey Hey in the Hayloft and Ants in Your Pants of 1939. But now he yearns to make his personal,meaningful notable movie, O Brother Where Art Thou? (The Coens imagined their movie was the type of thing Sullivan would fill made next.) “I want to hold a mirror up to life. I want this to be a picture of dignity! A true canvas of the suffering of humanity!” Sullivan tells his studio bosses.But with a little sex in it, or ” they add. They’d rather he made Ants in Your Pants of 1941. Being a pampered Hollywood director,though, Sullivan knows nothing of the poverty he seeks to depict, or so with a hobo costume from the wardrobe department and 10 cents in his wallet,he sets off to find out about it. apart from he keeps winding up back in Hollywood. “It’s nearly like gravity, he says. “As whether some force were saying: ‘Get back where you belong. You don’t belong out here in genuine life, or you phoney,you.’”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com