Chapter 2 Sullivan's Travels, 1941

Sullivan's Travels, 1941 1. Preston Sturges is still an unfamiliar name to most movie fans. In fact, before I watched his "The Lady Eve" and "Sullivans Travels", And only when he was a former Hollywood director that flashed in the "Movie History" book.But it was these two films that gave him a very important recognition in my mind, especially "Sullivan's Travels", which can be regarded as a must-see comedy classic.According to George Sadour, the film is Sturgess' "confession and declaration of faith."This is a comedy film in which a comedy film director earnestly explains "why we make comedy films", and its leading actor is the "big director Sullivan" who is similar to Sturges himself. "Sullivan wanted to make a film about 'reality' (tragedy), he started wandering, got into a lot of trouble, and eventually he learned how to live out 'fantasy' (comedy). Bitter and brilliant." - as described on the Internet this video.

American comedy in the era of sound films, which reached its golden age in the 1930s under the leadership of Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, and George Cucker.In the new edition of film history written by Christine Thompson and David Bordwell, the authors collectively refer to American comedies from 1934 to 1945 as "The Screwball Comedy".By the 1940s, due to the outbreak of World War II, the audience had lost enthusiasm for the traditional "romantic comedies" that described the poor getting rich overnight, Cinderella met Prince Charming, and turned their interest to socially critical or subversive comedies, and Comedies in general are going from box-office blockbusters to decline.During this period, only Preston Sturgis was comparable to Frank Capra.Throughout the 1940s, Sturgess made ten films with brilliant success.If not by era and genre, Truffaut has combined Preston Sturgis with Frank Capra, Ernst Lubitsch, Leo McCarey (Duck Soup) Known as the "American Comedy Quartet", this shows the importance of Sturgess in comedy movies.

2. Sturgess's previous work "Lady Eve" before "Sullivan's Travels" is still a comedy film with more inheritance than originality, borrowing many plots and dialogues similar to Lubitsch's "confrontation between the sexes" (a female liar and a rich man love), and the exaggerated bodily encounters in silent comedy.Although "Sullivan's Travels" still has this kind of "throwing cream, kicking ass" gimmicks, the main theme is very "grand"-discussing the meaning and value of comedy movies.The structure and style of this film are not as simple and smooth as popular comedy, but complex and multiple. The name and structure of "Sullivans Travels" (Sullivans Travels) imitated the famous fairy tale novel (Gullivers Travels).It is roughly divided into four parts - "Travel Notes of the Small People's Country", "Travel Notes of the Adult Country", "Travel Notes of Feidao" and "Travel Notes of Huiying Country".And "Sullivan's Travels" can be roughly divided into four parts - not only the places where Sullivan went, but also the style of comedy.

At the beginning of the film, the great director Sullivan was tired of his commercial films and determined to make a social realistic film, focusing on the unemployed, homeless, poor and farmers.In order to understand them, Sullivan, like Prince Siddhartha (Shakyamuni Buddha), had to (temporarily) renounce all splendor and wealth, and dress himself up as a ragged bum with only ten cents, Start his practice, to "experience life".The first part describes how Sullivan got rid of his huge entourage team and began to work for a fat lady in the country. As a result, he was sexually harassed by the fat lady on the first night and had to jump out of the window to escape. He stopped a car in the middle of the night and finally arrived at his destination After absurdly found himself back in Hollywood.This part is rather farce-like, even reminiscent of a kitsch comedy in the Italian style.

In the second part, Sullivan's travel is more like a fairy tale description in the novel, in the style of light comedy.He and a beautiful girl jumped on a train in an "amateur" clumsy figure, unbearable to the stench, cold and hunger, and only traveled for one night before jumping off in a town. When they found out that they had come to Las Vegas, Immediately, he summoned his entourage and returned to Hollywood in the crowd.In the third part, Sullivan finally experienced the life of the homeless. He slept, ate, walked with them, and finally ended his "great" life of misery after his shoes were stolen.This part has no dialogue and is presented in a silent comedy style, reminiscent of Chaplin.

3. The turning point of "Sullivan's Travels" is in the fourth part, which seems to "turn comedy into tragedy".Sullivan was stunned by gangsters while helping the poor, and was transported by train to a remote place, where he was inexplicably sentenced to six years in prison for various crimes.This part seems to have become a typical "prison movie", with brutal guards, cowardly prisoners, cruel climate, heavy labor, and black cages where they are solitary confinement after making mistakes, and so on.But director Sturgess didn't really "turn comedy into tragedy", the difference is not that it has a happy ending.It's its climax: Sullivan and his fellow prisoners are allowed to watch a movie, and the audience laughs when images of Mickey Mouse and Goofy are projected on the screen.If this movie is really a tragedy, Sullivan, as the director, should be in tears, but he also laughed. He asked himself "Should I laugh?" Understand "why do we make comedy films?", for whom and how. (In more popular terms, "Do the people need comedies?")

In the end, Sullivan returned to Hollywood in a clever "comedy way".He announced the abandonment of his social reality film - "OBrother, Where Art Thou" plan, and started shooting comedy again!And this "original plan" title was used by the Coen brothers for their "Homer epic" in 2000. "Sullivan's Travels" is a thrilling comedy all the way, not only because of its enigmatic four-part plot, its multiple stylistic shifts, but also because of its somewhat naive take on comedy. praise.Apparently Sturgess believes that "people who are poor and without a cone have the right to laugh", which is different from Capra's optimistic comedy. Sturges's films are full of doubts about American democratic society. His smile was bitter at the end.

4. In his "History of Film", George Sadour considered "Sullivan's Travels" to be an "allegorical film with an 18th-century flavor", but he also believed that Sturgis did not "pass the wealth" like Chaplin. Human touch and critical comedy are shown", but "deliberately" chose "Mickey Mouse" as a "mechanical comedy with no human or social value", turning it into "an opium to anesthetize the people"....Sadour has his own extremely profound and high-level vision, and his arguments are like a scalpel to the film's ultimate ills.But no one denies that "Sullivan's Travels" is a film with a strange light in the history of comedy films. It is full of wisdom, humor and compassion, and explores the function of comedy films in the most direct way.

"Sullivan's Travels" tidbits centered on actress Veronica Lake's hairstyle.It is said that Paramount didn't know what the film was about back then, so the posters all focused on Veronica Lake (in fact, her role cannot be compared with the actor's), and the slogan also used "Veronica Lake on the take". Still using this confusing poster scheme, it is probably because Veronica Lake's "peekaboo" hairstyle (curved and half covered the face) was too popular. (By the way, Sturgis himself was a fashion influencer who invented a staple of 20th-century life—the colorfast lipstick).Compared to Veronica Lake's enormous following—millions of women tried to emulate her hairstyle in the 1940s—Preston Sturgess was relatively lonely in Hollywood.In the words of George Sadour, "Sturgis was alone, with no disciples or imitators." Until the 1980s, the emergence of the Coen Brothers (especially "Raising Arizona") It makes people think of Sturgess again. Many people, even the Coen brothers themselves, said that they were fanatically obsessed with Sturges's movies and got inspiration from them.

Heaven Can Wait, 1943 Although people have various debates about "Lubitsch-style brushwork", they cannot escape the words "elegant, charming, witty, and funny". "Heaven Can Wait" (HeavenCanWait) still has that label.Lubitsch gave "Paradise" another frivolous taste.If that kind of "frivolity" is described, it is "gentle and honest, dignified and beautiful".The film is the epitome of a playboy's life.In his life, he was ignorant, suave and suave. He had done pranks, had sex, and lied, but he bid farewell to this world happily.This person weighed himself up and consciously went to hell to report, but the judge told him that he should go to heaven, where there are relatives waiting for him to be reunited.The life of this playboy is composed of several birthdays, the rhythm of the narrative is smooth, and a person's life is revealed in an orderly manner.

"Paradise Can Wait" is also the epitome of New York's upper class at the end of the 19th century.A wealthy businessman who dotes on his children, a passionate and sensible patriarch, a rich western tycoon, an arrogant French maid, a self-righteous relative... a city picture scroll composed of "people" is displayed on the screen, and some German film critics said it was the director. A picture of my hometown Berlin in the past.Lubitsch always looked at the characters in his movies with a gentle attitude towards life. He felt that people of any class, as long as they were not too abominable (such as the Nazis), had seats in heaven waiting for him.This is Lubitsch's first color film and his penultimate independent directorial work.He died after four years of illness.At his funeral, director Billy Wilder lamented, "There won't be another Lubitsch." William Wheeler responded, "Worse, there won't be another Lubitsch movie." , 1946/1964 Hemingway is often referred to as a "film writer", and from the 1930s to the 1960s, Hollywood coveted his works. (The Killers) is only a very short story, but it continues to attract big directors to turn it into a video.In addition to the two versions of Robert Siodmak and Don Siegel's Black and Violent mentioned here, Tarkovsky also filmed a 21-minute student project.The fascinating thing about this novel is that all actions are externalized, and all viewpoints are objective and dramatic. The first ten minutes of Siodermark's "Noir Hemingway Movie" come from the original book, and the next hour and a half is the creation of screenwriter Anthony Wyler.But Hemingway still said that of all the movies based on his own work, this is the only one that is "good."The restaurant scene in the first ten minutes is extremely exciting. Theodmak, who has been influenced by the expressionist style of Vinay and Murnau, uses high-key light and shadow to create a film noir atmosphere with strong contrast, followed by one of the most important film noir stars. One Burt Lancaster came out and accepted death.This is followed by a staged flashback that draws on the investigation of the murder—why a man welcomes others to kill him.In the black sea of ​​backtracking, the center of the dark vortex is a "femme fatale" - superstar Ava Gardner (Ava Gardner).The film climaxes with her selfish and desperate plea.A work in the style of early film noir was born.The "LIFE" magazine of the year commented that this film is an excellent melodrama, "There is no dull moment in the passage, and there is no stale sentence in the dialogue... there are only aggressive actions." It is true.Siodermark's version shows us how to turn a short story into a film. He continues and expands the spirit and style of the original without stretching it like a ramen. Don Siegel's, the source of the story is Siodermark's version, and although Hemingway's defenders would not admit that it is a good adaptation, it is undeniably an outstanding B-movie.In this film, the violence comes out of nowhere several times.Although the style is not close to the novel, but the writing of death is very close to Hemingway.Don Siegel is a director who relies entirely on action to complete the narrative, and this film also has a clear tough guy style (Eastwood is one of the few people who later inherited this style).Knowing that the killer is coming, why wait for death calmly?This is the problem both are trying to solve.Don Siegel's version is driven by the direct pursuit of the murderer, using flashbacks of three long paragraphs, which is more crisp than Theodmark.In the end, the call of death still comes from money and women, which is inherited some genes of film noir.It's a typical sexually indifferent B-movie, except for the villain, everyone can't laugh, or laugh badly.Don Siegel deliberately changed the identity of the protagonist from a boxer to a racing driver, replacing strength with speed.He directly converts the final legal punishment and the revelation of the truth into death. After all the main characters fall, the film ends. All the actors in this version are well-known.The Killer is played by Lee Marvin (the gray-haired action superstar); the Killed is played by John Cassavetes (the legendary independent film director); the femme fatale is played by Angie Dickinson (Angie Dickinson, the most representative blonde actress of the noir era); the bandit leader is played by Ronald Reagan (Ronald Wilson Reagan, later the President of the United States)-this is also the last time he performed in a movie before entering politics. No plot, just "points to reality": The Bicycle Thief, 1948 No matter how many times I rewatch it, Bicycle Thieves looks perfect to me.Once the idol actor Vittorio De Sica's contribution to the history of film is to create one of the peaks of "neorealism".From an intuitive point of view, while I was moved by its moral sense, I felt that it had a pure (everyday) visual poetry, which may come from the film's concise composition, as well as the restrained, slow, floating mobile photography.In fact, the cost of this movie is not cheap, the cost of 100 million lire was rare at the time, some scenes even used six cameras, perfect "realism" sometimes means that the film ratio is extremely high (plus non-professional actors usage of). Regarding the comments on this film, Andre Bazin's film criticism is one of the most important and insightful, and it is included in "What is a movie?" "middle. ——The following text is only a digest of Bazin’s article. (If you want to have a superficial understanding of neo-realism, you can watch a more than 30-minute interview with scholars in Disc 2 of The Criterion? Collection, a DVD distribution company known for releasing master art films). The intention of "The Bicycle Thief" is clear, and it describes the hardships of the people's livelihood in post-war Italy, which may have a strong contemporary character.If only this was the case, this movie could not become such a high-status classic.Worker Rich has been searching for Rome all day after stealing a car, but no one is willing to help him, the police station, church, labor union, and the general public, so the film creates a huge lonely field, the kind of isolation, helplessness , Despair gradually spread, surpassing the times.The more critical "stroke of magic" is the addition of the child Bruo, a character who has no influence on the story, and finally makes the film deepen the tragedy that was originally only social from the moral and ethical level. Many people debate whether "The Bicycle Thief" has a story?Perhaps we should say that it has "story", but it does not have "storytelling". Its stories are "probably no more than two lines" of social news (there may be such stories in our city, but they will definitely be ignored by the media. ); and it definitely doesn't have the dramatic tension that "movie story" has.The film is composed of a series of accidental events, many of which have no strict sequence: heavy rain, Catholic church, restaurant, Bazin once said that these events are completely interchangeable, we can't even determine whether the person Rich is chasing is a car thief, And he is not really epileptic.But that's the "integration of reality," Bazin said. "The Bicycle Thief" doesn't depend on the basic formula of the drama, and the plot no longer exists before the film. About the last scene of the film: after the father was caught stealing the car, he was released after being humiliated, walking in the sea of ​​people, and the son reached out to hold his father’s hand—this could easily be interpreted as some kind of flattery to the audience, Bring a touch of kindness to the film.Bazin's interpretation of this shot is very keen: this marks the growth of Bruno from a child who can only follow and look up to his father to an adolescent who walks side by side with his father, and father and son are truly equal. Sections in Time: Late Spring, 1949 Countless critics and directors have analyzed this important work of Yasujiro Ozu when he was forty-five years old.There are praises like "extremely thorough" (Hou Hsiao-hsien), and judgments like "the miracle of Ozu's films" (Jia Zhangke).Regardless of playwriting, composition, and performance, you can find detailed and beautiful expositions.But what you get from reading Ozu is by no means what you can say from reading those (or these) words.As long as you sit still, you will forget all the opinions and perceptions of others, and the rest is that you will naturally enter the world of Ozu.Like the cover of the CC version of "Late Spring", revisiting this movie is like flipping through an old photo album in private.It's more like staring at a section of time. At first glance, there are several Ozu films, and most of them seem repetitive, always the story of marrying a daughter, always symmetrical images, always these few actors.At first glance, there is nothing new, and even the taste after chewing is slightly the same.But the feelings brought by time and era are different. "Late Spring" does not seem to have ups and downs in drama, but it can always make people look at it with certainty.Don't feel boring, probably the most common people's sophistication and street sceneries are the most seductive.Based on our daily experience, the most interesting things are always the dramas that happen around us and in our lives.Of course, Ozu's films are not real life, as long as you see the section in "Late Spring" where the father and daughter watch Noh, you will understand that this is still a "drama", a performance, and a story.In Ozu's films, the detached and simple descriptions are probably true, kind, and beautiful. There is very little space in Late Spring, mostly in the father and daughter's home.The doorway, living room, corridor, upstairs, downstairs, several places appear repeatedly and neatly.Always bring the viewer in, as if this is where we have been, and even where we live.Once the daughter here is married away, and the makeup mirrors, tables and chairs are left unoccupied, the sense of loss naturally occurs.In the end, the space here becomes a cross-section of time—the daughter is gone, the room is a bit quiet and empty, the father is peeling an apple, and he pauses sadly, the close-up of the lonely arm, the scene cut into the ebb and flow of the seaside, the end.It would be a bit frivolous to say that this is a "speechless sigh", but this reflects the solidification of life and emotion in a certain place in the long years. Fellini Films: The Great Road, 1954 Fellini once called "La Strada" (La Strada) "the sum of my films", and critics who thought this work was poetic and surreal used surreal techniques to list the images in it, such as: horses, brown hair , jealousy, wedding feasts, singing, clowns, Madonna ceremonies, wings, the sea, nuns, wind... and of course the circus.They appear almost repeatedly in Fellini's work. People are full of various interpretations of "The Great Road".Writers have seen the theme of "self-seeking" since "Odyssey"; sociologists have seen the metaphor of "zero communication" in modern society; visionaries have seen eternal and poetic fairy tales like "Beauty and the Beast"; People saw a melodrama about the tragic experience of an unfortunate woman; of course, more people saw a journey of salvation in the meaning of St. Francis—so when the film was released, it was praised by the church and condemned by the left.But Fellini just said that "The Road" is about the loneliness of a person and how it disappears when two people are closely united. Relationship. I personally agree with the saying that the reason why this movie can impress people of all walks of life is that the above interpretations are intertwined and input into our subconscious mind by the pictures and music.The misfortune of the child, clown, and angel Jesomina is certainly sad, but the scene where Zambano finally throws himself on the beach and weeps pushes this grief to a higher level.There is nothing more shocking than seeing a brutish, bestial being, inspired by love, finally discover his own humanity.