A Film Canon

The greatest film about Hollywood since Show People, Sullivan's Travels poses the question of where film should stand in relation to mass poverty. At one level, this is a question of genre, as Sturges - and his cipher, director John Sullivan (Joel McCrea) - conclude that neither social realism, comedy, nor the simplistic hybrid characteristic of Capra is an acceptable solution. It is also an issue of representation, in which Sullivan's realisation of the complications of depicting the poor is itself only convincing against the backdrop of what is, ostensibly, a fairly representative sample. Finally, it is an engagement with narrative, as Sullivan's attempt to integrate himself into various impoverished narratives culminates with an example of the very trite predictability (a Disney short) that he was ostensibly escaping. The result is a tangential hybrid of comedy and social realism, representation and non-representation, in which every event or object possesses only the most oblique, contingent, relation to the next, and Sturges is forced to introduce overt meta-fictional devices simply - and barely - to keep the script within the realm of narrative, most conspicuously in the form of the generic 'girl' (Veronica Lake) and final 'twist'. In this way, the cross-nuances of The Lady Eve are further generalised from conversation into a principle of Sturges' universe; a space in which the most minor local differences can produce vast, sudden discrepancies in tone, style, and even character, while, conversely, all such discrepances are only apparent, reducible to a look, a gesture, an inflection. Although this undoubtedly contributes to the comic dimension of the film, it simultaneously generates a melancholy that is so pervasive as to be identified with the film, and is explicated in the central, extended montage sequence, in which Sullivan and the girl's sojourn among the impoverished takes them, momentarily, to a state that is beyond the ambit of the film, which accordingly reverts to a more primitive register, as if Sturges' final quest were for some compromise between directing and not directing, speech and silence.