Make 'em laugh

Hanna rains out the Mets, meaning that I have a day-night doubleheader obligation tomorrow, meaning no time for a movie then, meaning a home double feature tonight. I knew that the first thing I wanted to watch was something I'd just picked up from Amazon for $5.99, and my first thought for the double-feature theme was Clooney jailbreak films, but then I came up with a better theme.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

(2000)

With Burn After Reading on the horizon, I thought it was time for a Joel-and-Ethan flick I hadn't seen for a while. To be honest, I didn't know what to make of this when I saw it in the theater, and I don't really know what to make of it now. The music's great, the Odyssey stuff is uniformly interesting if not uniformly effective, and the broad performances of Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, and Holly Hunter are grand goofy fun. So what's not to love? Well, now that I own it, I guess I'll have to screen it again before another eight years go by so that I can get closer to an answer.

Sullivan's Travels

(1942)

For this film, on the other hand, I have no trouble answering the question "What's not to love?" That would be the early slapstick chase sequence, complete with whiteface racial humor. But. If you're watching it for the first time, please don't give up at that point, and please file that sequence away for future reference. Because first, as the film develops, you understand why a lowest-common-denominator sequence, replete with all available clichés (including, in addition to the put-upon darky, "a little sex"), has to be there. And second, if that sequence shows a black character (rather, caricature) in all the icky intellectual slavery equivalency of the age, the film's climactic sequence (and its best, and quite simply one of the best in the history of the goofy medium) atones with what has to have been one of the half-dozen most human and dignified and thoroughly uncondescending portrayals of black characters by a pre-civil rights era white director.

Which points up what's great about this film: it butters its theoretical bread on both sides--cinema can be the greatest possible force for social good; cinema is often at its best, and its most valuable, when it simply entertains--without ever dropping it on the floor or even getting buttery fingerprints all over the kitchen. A miraculous film. Oh, and Veronica Lake ain't hard to look at, neither.