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"To the memory of those who made us laugh." The Grapes of Wrath is on Preston Sturges' mind, his response begins with "The End" in a screening room. Sullivan (Joel McCrea) the cinéaste behind So Long Sarong and Hey Hey in the Hayloft, who aims for nobler projects and is eager to explain the symbolism, O Brother Where Art Thou? is just the thing. "A dignified picture, a true canvas of the suffering of humanity." "But with a little sex." All roads lead to Hollywood so he has to step further out, the experiment is "to sample the bitter dregs of vicissitude" with hobo's bindle and stubble. Riding the rails, sleeping in flophouses, sampling garbage cans, an impressionistic amalgam of Chaplin and Borzage and Wellman. "There's always a girl in the picture," in this one it's the aspiring starlet (Veronica Lake) in no mood to be anybody's muse. From Keystone to Kafka, more realism than he bargained for. Sturges two decades ahead of Fellini with the director's responsibility, a splitting of the frivolous-serious atom, "no use overplaying it, is there?" The self-portrait is fascinatingly ambivalent—the protagonist is stubborn, something of a windbag, in need of a dunk in the swimming pool and a reenactment of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Slapstick and tragedy, verbal volleys and silent montages, acerbity for studio honchos chasing the bottom line and earnestness for the diner counterman with a free donut for a hungry stranger. The many contradictions are pulled together in a guffawing epiphany out of Vidor's The Crowd, Disney shenanigans in church to caustically equate cinema and religion as brief palliatives in a cosmos of misery. Death and resurrection of the artist (cf. Le Testament d'Orphée), "if ever a plot needed a twist..." With William Demarest, Robert Warwick, Porter Hall, Franklin Pangborn, Robert Greig, Eric Blore, Jimmy Conlin, Byron Folger, Frank Moran, Esther Howard, and Charles R. Moore. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |