Preston Sturges' 1942 film Sullivan's Travels exists as a snapshot of Depression-era America and a testament to something more timeless. What? Spirit, maybe? It's dressed up like a screwball comedy with classic pratfall gags and meet-cute set-ups. Then something dark and amazing happens. Sturges take a sharp left turn into documenting the lives of the millions of Americans that were still recovering from the collapse of the economy. He shows us desperate men scrounging for food and shelter with an un-Hollywood realism that must have been shocking then and is still striking now. The men look old and haggard and nothing like typical extras. After the gags and glamourous banter with Veronica Lake we almost feel guilty about enjoying those earlier parts. There are still some laughs and cute little set-pieces between Joel McCrea playing a director who's slumming it and Lake's failed actress, but they feel different now. Like everything has been dragged thought the dirt. Later when McCrea is arrested and sent to a penal colony to become part of a chain gang, things descend a little further below the surface of everyday life and now miles away from Hollywood's soft-focus glamour. 

It's an amazing sequence that to me has no precedent in film outside documentaries, and presages a whole new kind of art American movie that audiences won't see for decades. In other parts of the world this kind of neo-realist approach was about to take hold. In Italy they had seen the dark side of humanity during the War and would soon set a new tone for realistic depictions of life in the movies. America would make their own stylised version of film noir in the '40s and early 50's but these scenes stand alone. Once he shows us this side of life, Sturges pulls back and decides that people need a break from all that misery and they deserve to be entertained. His duty as an artist is to make people forget their sadness, a lesson he learns in the film when in the midst of his despair he's taken to watch a Mickey Mouse cartoon with his fellow convicts. It proves to be a kind of revelation and in many ways it became the credo of Hollywood for the next couple of decades. Then sometime in the late '60s the studio system fell apart, film schools opened up and directors watched European films and for better or worse developed a social conscience.

But those scenes of the unwashed men and beaten down prisoners remain, haunting you.