Joel McCrea, Sullivan's Travels

by Rebecca Morris

In the annals of "spectacular" screen performances you'd find no entry for Joel McCrea, whose career extended from the '20s to the '60s. You would, however, find him on the roll of "exemplary" performances--for several occasions in which his own range and admirable respect for his material resulted in enduring films of great subtlety and wit. McCrea's virtues as an actor--modesty, precision, simplicity--caused him to be undervalued even at the height of his success, and many movie fans today do not even know him. A look at the best film McCrea ever made, Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels, shows you what an injustice this is.

Sturges believed McCrea to be the most underrated actor in Hollywood in the late '30s. Conventionally, almost blandly, good-looking McCrea easily read on film as a lightweight. But Sturges evidently saw that McCrea's self-effacing ease, which the director nicely exploited in The Palm Beach Story, could be parlayed into both depth and diversity. And so Sturges decided to write a script specifically for McCrea--Sullivan's Travels. (Upon hearing Sturges had done so, McCrea remarked, characteristically, that people wrote scripts for his friend Gary Cooper, not for him.) One of the great films about Hollywood, Sullivan's Travels tells of a successful director of comedies who longs to make an "important" film, and sets out on the road to experience firsthand the poverty and pain that life has unfortunately spared him. Here was a brilliant vehicle for the exploitation of Joel McCrea's Waspy demeanor, his veneer of privilege under which, Sturges saw, lay the best of '40s-style decency, generosity and self-accountability.

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McCrea knew he had been given some of the smartest, fastest, funniest dialogue ever written for film, and the overriding virtue of his performance in Sullivan's Travels is that he makes himself the servant of it. The hilarious lines that roll off his tongue never take the shape of "jokes." And because McCrea never stalks the scripts "great moments," Sullivan has a humanity for us that many contemporary screen characters, reduced to a string of "moments," do not. McCrea gives Sullivan a body language that is in keeping with the character's life of ease and sophistication but that belies, mostly in pauses, a charming embarrassment at being human. (McCrea is the master of a style that becomes cloying in the less subtle hands of Warren Beatty in Heaven Can Wait and Kevin Costner in Dances With Wolves.)

One of the notable things about Sullivan's Travels is that it blends the genres of light comedy, farce, satire, drama and social criticism. McCrea's portrayal of Sullivan is the thread that keeps the fabric whole. The Sullivan who falls in the pool with Veronica Lake is the same man who later endures a prison camp when his wish for "real" experience is brutally granted, and the same man who finally finds true love as well as his true calling as a comedic director. And by the end of Sullivan's Travels, McCrea has created an Everyman out of a man who lives in the unreal world of Hollywood. Sturges seems to have inserted a few lines into Sullivan's Travels that double as commentary on his star and tell us what he loves about McCrea. When Sullivan is thrown into prison as a common criminal and reveals to an inmate his real standing in the world, he asks, "Don't I look like a picture director?" to which the old man answers, "You look more like a soda jerk, or a plasterer." An awfully good-looking soda jerk, perhaps, but you get the point.

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