Movie director John L. Sullivan, the man behind the megaphone on such inspired works as Ants in Your Pants of 1939, is a past-master of the Hollywood comedy. But in future, Sullivan (played by Joel McCrea in perfect earnestness, as is his special comic bent) wants to turn his hand to drama, with social significance (“and a little sex,” pleads his producer). Determined to learn the true meaning of the word “poverty,” Sullivan sets out, to the protestations of everyone from his producer to his butler, 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. These range from “false arrest” (impersonating a poor person) to the real thing. Busted, beaten, abused at the hands of a chain-gang cheerleader, and given up for dead in Hollywood, Sullivan reappears, having learned something, after all: the true meaning of the word “escape.”
In the aftermath of the Great Depression, and on the eve of U.S. entrance into the European conflagration - the year 1941 - 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, at once, searches the grim depths of poverty, prisons, and chain gangs; and a film that is, in the end, an hilarious exposé of its own, well-established concern. (JB)