In this paper, I will discuss the film Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941). This film is a perfect example of classical Hollywood filmmaking. Sullivan’s Travels contains many key ideologies of this style of filmmaking. The film’s ideology is shown through many filmmaking techniques, such as narrative causality, rite of passage, continuity editing, temporal order, and narrative closure. I will be specifically focusing on narrative closure, how temporal logic is not correctly displayed throughout the scenes, rite of passage, and themes surrounding continuity editing.
A theme that I find most relevant to classical Hollywood film is a strong degree of narrative closure. Almost every classical Hollywood film has a strong narrative closure and you can see this in Sullivan’s Travels. When the main character…show more content… The only time he experiences true suffering is as a convicted felon forced into hard labor. During this time, he goes to a movie feature with the other felons and it is a comedy film, in which Sullivan realizes that people want to watch comedic films, it makes them feel happy and as if they are escaping their troubles. Through Sullivan’s original deviance from his identity and his understanding by the end of the film, the film achieves that true aspect of Hollywood film narrative closure. On the other hand, a theme that I find lacking in the film is the temporal order. Instead of the film flowing together and every scene seamlessly going into the next, I felt that it was a bit choppy, more like each individual event was something different from the other. There were many turns of events and so many different things that happened. When I look back on the film, each individual scene sticks out in my head as something different, instead of thinking of the film as a whole. For example, every time he would venture out to live his “homeless” life, something would