alr

Sullivan's Travels

Screening on Film
Directed by Preston Sturges.
With Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake, Robert Warwick.
US, 1941, 35mm, black & white, 91 min.
Print source: HFA

One of director Preston Sturges’s many great comedies of the 1940s, this brilliant probe into the psyche of a comedy filmmaker—decades before Woody Allen or Blake Edwards found success with the theme—is his most personal film and a classic road movie. Joel McCrea stars as a successful movie director who, longing to direct a "serious" film, sets out on the road, dressed as a hobo, to see the "real world." Along the way he befriends an actress wannabe and learns a few valuable lessons on human resilience and the power of laughter. A masterful combination of razor-sharp satire and sentimentality, Sullivan’s Travels inspired the recent Coen Brothers feature Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?.

Part of film series

Read more

Treasures from the Harvard Film Archive: S–T

Other film series with this film

Read more

Sullivan’s Travels Revisited. A Conversation with Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

The Complete Stanley Kubrick

Read more

Community in Cinema

Read more

Crime Scenes as History. Five Korean Films

Read more

The Lady and the Typewriter

Read more

Sixties Shinoda

Read more

From the Collection – Bob Hoskins

Read more

Tarr / Krasznahorkai

Read more

Little Fugitive

Read more

The Spring is Over (Prague 1970)