MORRIS DICKSTEIN
73
epigraph that Farrell borrowed from Chekhov: "What writers belonging
to the upper class have received from nature for nothing, plebeians ac–
quire at the cost of their youth."
There was no doubt a comic side to this quest for the lower depths
when so many were desperate to leave it behind. I am sure more writers
nurtured their radicalism in the Hollywood hills than in riding the rails.
As the Depression ended, Preston Sturges brilliantly satirized
Hollywood's social conscience in
Sullivan's Travels
(1942) - by sending a
frivolous director of inane comedies (played by Joel McCrea) out on the
road looking for the poor, with an entourage of studio retainers fol–
lowing close behind. Instead of another edition of
Ants in Your Pants,
his usual kind of movie, McCrea wants to make a serious epic of social
concern called 0
Brother, Mere Art Thou?,
though his thoughtful but-
. ler warns him that only "the morbid rich" have an interest in poverty,
which is really a plague to be shunned at all cost.
At first the director's cushioned life and his absurd play-acting pre–
vent him from making even superficial contact with the poor. (A limou–
sine ferries him to where he can hop a freight train.) But then, in a series
of circumstances that could happen only in a movie, he loses his memory,
his identity, is given up for dead, gets railroaded by the judicial system
somewhere in the South, and is propelled without appeal into a world
of "real" suffering - that is, the chain-gang world of movies like
I Am a
Fugitive,
with a chorus of black prisoners singing "Go Down, Moses."
Sturges shifts from satirizing social-problem movies (and the shallow
Hollywood types who make them) to re-enacting them in a setting of
dream-like intensity. He traps his well-meaning director in just the kind
of movie he wanted to make, a stylized world of arbitrary punishment
and grim endurance. After merely slumming in social misery, he is swal–
lowed up by it, with no life-line to his famil;ar world.
But the movie doesn' t end here . Along with his fellow prisoners,
Sullivan finds some momentary relief in watching cartoons about Mickey
Mouse and Pluto. This is what the Depression audiences really needed,
says Sturges: escape, light-hearted enjoyment. The point is pungently
philistine and a trifle complacent: Sturges the comedy-director is telling
us that it's laughter, not lower-depths sociology, that is the universal sol–
vent. It's the entertainer, not the revolutionary, who has the common
touch. Comedy eases the burden of the wretched of the earth, and unites
the privileged artist for a brief moment with his suffering brother, that
thirties myth, the common man. Yet
Sullivan's Travels,
though self-con–
gratulatory, pays handsome tribute to the genre it satirizes and recreates,
the lower-depths movie. Even for a comic artist, as Chaplin showed, the
