As with The Lady Eve, this is another comedy by director Preston Sturges and was even released in the same year. However while I didn’t really like that other one, I found this to be a work of pure genius. Its comedic skits are just as inanely dumb but it leans into the inanity to justify its worth and even features an unexpectedly dark turn. This is a film that surprised and delighted me at every turn while being mostly respectful about the poor and downtrodden in it.
John Sullivan is a successful Hollywood director who is known for his hit comedies. However he has grown dissatisfied with this lighthearted fare and wants to make a serious film about the plight of the poor and the downtrodden. When his studio bosses persuade him that he knows nothing about the poor as he has always been well off, he decides to dress up as a hobo and take to the road in search of trouble. The studio tries to protect him by having a fully-staffed bus follow him so he ditches him. Eventually he arrives in a diner where a young struggling actress takes pity on him and buys him breakfast. The girl has given up on making it in Hollywood so Sullivan tries to help her by going back for his car to give her a ride. This results in her finding out who he really is. As he still insists on resuming his tour of being poor, she decides to accompany him, saying that he would be unable to survive on his own.
Once you understand the premise, the film takes shape in your mind and so you expect it to proceed in a certain way. Yet it never stops surprising me. Sullivan’s idea of trying to learn what it’s like to be poor is of course a preposterous one and the film is brilliant in having everyone tell him how it’s innately disrespectful to even make the attempt and why it’s wrong to romanticize the experience of being poor, including by his own household staff. Whenever he tries, it doesn’t take very long at all before he retreats back to his usual life of comfort and luxury. When he feels like he needs to hitch a ride on a freight train to get the authentic experience of being a hobo, he has his staff call the train company to learn where he should get on. When he actually meets some real hobos, he tries to engage them in a conversation about the labor situation in America and they of course ignore him. That was an absolutely hilarious exchange. I cannot emphasize enough how amazing it is to see a film released in 1941 be so woke about class consciousness. It feels far ahead of its time.
The way the film uses humor further demonstrates how Sturges who also wrote this script is actively conscious of what he is doing. I disliked the ludicrously sped-up chase scene as Sullivan tries to escape from his entourage as it is low humor directly copied from children’s cartoons. But later the film takes a shockingly dark turn as Sullivan learns what it is truly like to be one of the downtrodden masses without a safety net and suddenly cheap, crass humor has its place after all. It even manages to balance out the use of the black driver of the bus in the usual comic role with a very respectful portrayal of a black church. This is simply a film that is brilliant on multiple levels, beginning from the opening scene which is a parody of a fictional preachy film about the conflict between capitalism and communism.
The film does make some odd choices along the way. Notice how the female lead character, played by Veronica Lake, does not actually have a name and is simply known as The Girl despite her central role in the story. The whole side-plot about Sullivan being already married purely as a business arrangement also feels like a weird distraction to me. But there is no doubt that this is film that was far more intelligently made that I could have expected. Even as it ends by justifying the existence and social contribution of Hollywood, it is well earned.