Sullivans Travels essays

Sullivans Travels essays The Great Depression was a time when Americans were lost economically, and emotionally, and many movies have been made in an attempt to capture the horrors of life in that time. The film Sullivans Travels however is in my opinion satirizes the Depression. It inaccurately depicts the tribulations of the 1940s and is useless in its historical account. The value in this movie lays in entertainment, and in nothing else. In short, the protagonist in the film Sullivan, a wealthy movie director, wants to make a movie about pain and suffering, and in doing so, decides to live out on the streets with 10 cents in his pocket. From the beginning, he makes a mockery out of human kind in general. We see Sullivan going back and forth from his street-life to his mansion, never fully experiencing how life was for the unfortunate. In his attempt to become a tramp, he makes a joke out of the Depression. He is poor when it is convenient to him, and when he meets a pretty girl, he tries to use him money and fame to impress her. The movie really never focuses in on the pain and suffering of anyone, but instead we see a fickle man who attempted to do something beneficial, but instead turned away from it when it became difficult. Sullivan chooses when he wants to sleep in a bed, and out on the streets, and when the streets posed a problem, he had his team following him in a van while they promoted his actions as simply a publicity stunt. The climate during the Depression was that the poor and unfortunate had no choice as to whether they should sleep on the street or in a bed on any given night, they had no other life that they could go back to. In this movie, we are not exposed to any of the hardships that Americans underwent, but instead we see a game that Sullivan played. At the end of this movie we as the viewer have not been given and interesting insight to life in the Depression, we a ...