Josef Krebs

Written and directed by silly-but-serious cynical genius Preston Sturges, Sullivan’s Travels starts out with a dark and gloomy film-within-a-film showing two figures battling on a train crossing a bridge, symbolizing labor grappling with management to their mutual destruction. But as soon as we get out of the screening room, things lighten up both visually and in mood, the movie becoming a bright, witty slapstick satire on Hollywood and a pretentious, self-important director, Sullivan (Joel McCrea). This auteur wants to make a sociologically and artistically meritorious picture with messages about grim death, war, and the suffering of the unemployed during The Great Depression but, coming from a privileged background, he knows nothing about trouble. So he decides to go looking for it by dressing as a hobo and drifting across America.