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Last week's Movie Quiz winners

You'd hardly know from the above poster that Joel McCrea was the real star of last week's quiz movie, Sullivan's Travels, or that it was written and directed by the great Preston Sturges. The poster is exactly what film director John L. Sullivan (McCrea) is talking about at the beginning of the film: "I want this picture to be a document. 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! With a little sex in it." That movie, O Brother Where Art Thou? (sound familiar?) would have been lousy, but the picture that Sturges made not only has everything in that description, it's in a class by itself: slapstick tragedy.

(A picture that's an old movie trivia test all by itself, one that includes stalwart character actors William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, and Byron Foulger. Your task: find them.)

Decades before the auteur theory, Sturges made a pretentious director his protagonist, and that's only the first of many surprisingly modern touches in this morality play with pratfalls about the value of comedy. McCrea, at the height of his good-guy stardom, is perfect as the big-hearted but shallow director John L. Sullivan, who wants to learn how to literally suffer to better his art, only to learn his lesson from Mickey Mouse. Besides a plot that revolved around a question of artistic integrity, Sturges' comparisons of Sullivan's opulent celebrity life and his time in the flophouse and on the chaingang must have pushed '40s Hollywood's limits for showing poverty (in a major film) about as far as they'd let it go.

Even though it's a movie about the movies-- new Hollywood's favorite subject-- there's no worry of Sullivan's Travels ever being remade: besides being far too pointed a look at pampered, psuedo-liberal Hollywood, the dialogue is so fast and nuanced I doubt there are enough A-list stars who could deliver it. And of course, if a remake didn't have those things-- as well as a hilarious go-cart chase scene, a seamless transition from comedy to drama, and a reach-for-the-moon final moment that actually works-- it wouldn't be Sullivan's Travels.

Again, an unexpected (and heartwarming) bounty of winners who recognize a great movie when they see some stills from it, so congratulations and a ride in a cockeyed caravan to the following: Wayne Palmer, Song-Un Lee, Bob Aulert, E. Yarber, Donald Greene, Michael Kelly, Mark Gisleson, Dennis Lynch, Bob Redwing, mick, Jeffrey Rapp, Peter Schilling, Michael Mattson, Bill Hearne, Thomas Miller, Nancy Louise Rutherford, and Kevin Musolino.

Posted by Steve Monaco at November 5, 2007 12:46 AM

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