"Sullivan's Travels issui generis: there is nothing else quite like it, not even in Sturges' work. It's a movie about wanting to makea movie: people later on would see a parallel to Fellini's 8-1/2, but the Sturges film ('Sturges' 8-1/2' asit's come to be called) is in some ways even more daring. (It's a) comedy about a Hollywood director (JoelMcCrea) who is noted for his comedies but who wants now to do a serious film full of idealism and socialrelevance, suitable to troubled modern times. When it is pointed out to this rich and famous man that hedoesn't know much at all about 'trouble,' he sets out to find it, disguising himself as a tramp and taking tothe road in the travels of the title...(It's) Sturges' attempt at connecting what he does-his 'comedy'-to theun-comic realities beyond it. Just as he feels impelled to connect his (own) good fortune to the incalculablebad fortune of all those others. It's characteristic that the Sturges comedy that is most directly about hisown success should also be the one 'comedy' that most directly-and worryingly-confronts such realities asfailure and poverty and injustice. And the act of confronting such things while still maintaining the comicmovie mode becomes the center of the film-a kind of moral testing of that mode, and of Sturges' owninvestment in it." --James Harvey, Romantic Comedy