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 Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig

Read more

Rosine Mbakam, 2025 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Read more

The Illusory Tableaux of Georges Méliès

Read more

Activism and Post-Activism. Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981-2022

Read more

Fables of the Reconstruction. Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias

Read more

Ben Rivers, Back to the Land

Read more

Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque

Read more

Make Way for Tomorrow. Carson Lund’s Eephus

Read more

Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Collective Monologue