Hollywood movie director John L. Sullivan is a past-master of the escape comedy, the man behind the megaphone on such inspired works as Ants in Your Pants of 1939. But in future, Sullivan--played by Joel McCrea in perfect earnestness, his special comic bent--wants to turn to drama with social significance. Determined to learn the true meaning of the word “poverty,” he sets out into what is known in Hollywood as the real world (i.e., beyond Beverly Hills). He meets hobo/hippie/Hollywood-hopeful Veronica Lake, who joins him in his misadventures. When he reappears--busted, beaten, abused at the hands of a chain-gang cheerleader--Sullivan has learned something, after all: the true meaning of the word “escape.”
In the year 1941, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, and on the eve of U.S. entrance into the European conflagration, Preston Sturges chose to satirize a sacrosanct tenet of the cultural establishment: namely, that the “social exposé” is of more noble descent, therefore, of greater value to the population-at-large, than plebeian comedy. What he created was a strange hybrid: a film that searches the grim depths of poverty, prisons, and chain gangs; and a film that is, in the end, a hilarious exposé of its own, well-established concern.