Bosley Crowther reviews Preston Sturges’ work. He focuses on Sullivan’s Travels, in which a Hollywood director with Marxist sympathies tires of making light musical comedies, and desires to make politically significant pictures which “hold a mirror up to life.” After an altercation with a policeman and a case of mistaken identity, Sullivan finds himself on a brutal Southern chain gang, confesses to murdering the mysteriously disappeared film director John Sullivan thereby enacting his own media death in order to publicize his whereabouts and to save himself from literal death and the physical torments of life on a chain gang. During his time on the chain gang, his one release is viewing a funny cartoon, so he abandons his serious filmmaking ambitions and decides to make comedies.

Crowther sums up Sullivan’s Travel’s arguments: “Now, to all intents and purposes, Mr. Sturges is ably arguing that pictures which “stink with messages” are so much tommy-rot and the screen’s fundamental service is to hold life at an arm’s-length.” Crowther locates what he describes as “a most ingenious paradox” in Sturges’ work: cinema as an outlet for escapism, and frequently a metaphorical narration of its own escapist traditions (e.g. Chain Gang which contemplates the political implications of escaping or disappearing from society).

Chain Gang depicts spectacular escapes while advertising its own denial of narrative closure at the end, even though Great Depression film was always expected to provide an outlet for escapism and release from financial hard times. Chain Gang not only refused to provide its viewer with narrative closure, but flaunted its own display of brutality as a capitalist gimmick to attract spectatorship (real chains from chain gang in theater lobby). Whereas economic modernity argument (see Lichtenstein tag) suggests that Chain Gang elicits and co-opts political energy, the film’s commercial pitch – provoking capitalist desires to view a film that in many ways challenges them – would imply a different relationship. In the end, Chain Gang’s commercialization of its own subversion of American government participated in an elaborate New Deal propaganda campaign. However, Chain Gang’s meditation upon its implication in traditions of film escapism can be read as resisting the film’s own politics.