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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?.

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