Alternate Screen : The Road to Hollywood

Here’s news for those who thought Hollywood self-satires began with “Get Shorty.”

What many consider the best of them all, made way back in 1942, will screen Friday night at the Orange County Museum of Art.

“Sullivan’s Travels” was written and directed by Preston Sturges, but there’s more here than in his classic screwball comedies. There’s some of the dark social comment contained in “Gulliver’s Travels,” the classic 18th century novel to which the title refers.

That “Sullivan” contains social comment, yet pokes fun at movie makers who use it, demonstrates Sturges at his most skillful. It actually works.

Sullivan, played by Joel McCrea, is a successful writer-director of fluffy Hollywood comedies who decides he must devote himself to more socially important themes.

His panicked bosses point out he knows nothing about how the other half lives, which Sullivan concedes. But rather than quit his crusade, he goes out to see the other half. Dressed in hobo rags from the studio costume department, he goes on the road with only a dime in his pocket.

The satire of Hollywood mores alternates with the portrayal of misery’s realities. And romance emerges, of course, when Sullivan meets The Girl (Veronica Lake).

But the movie ends with Sullivan realizing the value of laughter and comedy in grim times. This was, after all, the depths of World War II.

If it all sounds like Preston Sturges, the real Sullivan, working out a midlife crisis, well, so be it. Few who do it have the results enshrined in the National Film Registry.

* “Sullivan’s Travels,” 6:30 p.m. Friday, Lyon Auditorium, Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. $5-$3. Running time: 90 minutes. Unrated. (949) 759-1122.

Beautiful but Flawed ‘Sexual Innocence’

Those with a taste for the avant-garde may want to take in “The Loss of Sexual Innocence,” which plays through today in Laguna Niguel and opens Friday in Brea.

The R-rated film by Mike Figgis, whose “Leaving Las Vegas” earned him an Oscar nomination, cuts between scenes of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and scenes from the life of a filmmaker named Nic, a thinly veiled portrayal of Figgis himself.

“Visually exquisite, intensely personal,” the New York Times observed, “. . . but for every haunting scene, another one fizzles.” Those with a taste for avant-garde cinema “will find moments of surpassing beauty in this courageous, deeply flawed movie.”

Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas found the film “never less than ravishing” but “elliptical, perhaps to a fault.” His advice: “Respond to this film with emotion rather than reason, and wait until the film is over to start thinking about it.”

* “The Loss of Sexual Innocence,” Edwards Rancho Niguel 8, 25471 Rancho Niguel Road. It starts Friday at Edwards Brea Plaza, 453 Associated Road, and Art Theatre, 2025 E. 4th St., Long Beach. Running time: 101 minutes. Rated: R. (562) 438-5435.

Many Lives of ‘The Red Violin’

In April “The Red Violin” won eight Genies, the Canadian equivalent of the Oscar, including best picture, best director, best screenplay and best original score. It continues in Costa Mesa.

The violin, curiously reddish and magically exquisite in tone, is the true star of the show. The movie follows it from its creation in baroque Italy through the hands of owners in 18th century Austria, Victorian England, Maoist China and modern Montreal, where it is being auctioned.

Canadian director Francois Girard filmed on three continents and in five languages and wove a suspense and mystery story into the collage; a sort of music private eye tries to uncover the violin’s secrets.

A consensus of critics who have reviewed the film is it runs a bit too long, is uneven but is unified by an extraordinarily sumptuous score written by John Corigliano and performed by Joshua Bell and the London Philharmonic.

* “The Red Violin,” Edwards South Coast Village, 1561 W. Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa. Running time: 132 minutes. Not rated. (714) 540-0594.

A Teen Film With Heart, Not Vulgarity

If you like “Desert Blue,” which opens Friday in Costa Mesa, you’re going to have a hard time explaining it to your friends.

It’s about a group of bored teenagers in a tiny desert town. Actually, it’s about a soap opera actress who arrives there with her father, a professor of pop culture, to view a 60-foot sculpture of an ice cream cone. Well, it’s really about the toxic soft drinks they manufacture there from the water stolen from the water park.

New York Newsday describes the film as “charmingly goofy . . . offbeat and ingratiating.

“It’s a small story . . . but ‘Desert Blue’ also has a novelistic capacity for character and setting, without either the maudlin sentimentality or gratuitous vulgarity of most teen-oriented movies. It’s got heart, in other words.”

* Edwards Town Center, 3199 Park Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Running time: 90 minutes. Rated: R. (714) 751-4184.