Christmas Festivities

"What's the Matter with Capra?": Sullivan's Travels and the Popular Front

“…A few years earlier Sturges had authored the tycoon biopic The Power and the Glory (1933), whose fragmented, flashback storytelling method and downward life trajectory anticipated Citizen Kane. 29 Sturges deprives Sullivan of these signs of his own morbid sensibility. Sullivan was Sturges reimagined as a pure product of the leisure class without the distinctive history that had given Sturges and his films their distance from American pieties.…”

“…He knew it got in the way of the sort of comedy Sullivan claimed to be after. 47 So does the cartoon itself. The Disney animation (Sturges's first choice was a Chaplin short) looks backward through Sullivan's earlier car-chase scene to vaudeville comedy, with its roots in working-class experience.…”