Next up on the AFI list, a movie I’d never even heard of, and knew absolutely nothing about. And it’s good!

The movie is from 1941, a year after The Grapes of Wrath and still in that late-Depression/cusp of WW2 period. The basic premise is that a rich and famous Hollywood comedy director yearns to make a serious dramatic movie about poverty and the tribulations of the masses in these desperate times. (Random fact: The movie he wants to make is based on the book O Brother, Where Art Thou? and when they said that, I was like “oh, I had no idea the Coen movie was based on a book!” But it’s not: The book is totally fictitious, and the Coen movie title is referencing this movie.)

But the studio heads try to talk him out of it, because his comedies are lucrative, and one of their arguments is that he has no experience with poverty and doesn’t even know what it’s like for the masses. So he’s all, “ah, you’re right, I will go on the road as a tramp and see poor America for myself!” Which was extremely not their point, and they start panicking.

What follows is a farcical road trip where he’s at first followed by his servants (including a very Stephen-Fry-as-Jeeves-y butler) and studio people, and even after he gets away from them, he keeps finding himself ending back up in Hollywood. But eventually, he meets up with Veronica Lake, an unsuccessful actress who wants to leave Hollywood herself to go back home, and they set off together for a more successful (and accidentally, much too successful) poverty tour, and I won’t spoil it past that.

The movie is surprisingly sexy for its era, very surprisingly respectful of a Black church and its congregation that come into the movie at one point, dark at times, funny most of the time, full of crackling dialogue, very clear-eyed about the inescapable power of wealth and privilege, and just generally doing what you’d want from a smart satire.

Preston Sturges is the writer and director of this movie. Astonishingly, this movie was the fourth of a set of movies all released within nearly a year of each other — between August 1940 and December 1941, he wrote and directed The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, and then this; critical opinion at the time wasn’t even united in seeing this as the major standout of those works. I’ve obviously never seen any of those other movies, but I think I need to put them on my list to check out.