I absolutely love this movie. One of my favorite lines is “You two are just dumber than a bag of hammers”
So many great lines!
It was because of this movie that I went to see “Burn After Reading” – another funny film by the Cohen brothers. Though there are some very violent moments that kind of take you out of it…
O Brother is my favorite Coen Brother movie (and I like them all). Sure, *Lebowski *is funnier, and *No Country *is more profound, but *O Brother *fills me with joy. I can watch it endlessly. I think it’s the most perfect movie they’ve made.
This is a great observation. I love Raising Arizona and Hudsucker Proxy for their slapstick value, and Fargo and Blood Simple for the dark comedy, and No Country… for the profoundity… but O Brother is just sheer joy. Thanks Alessan.
On hindsight, I had a brush with celebrity in that I met Tim Nelson while he was in high school. My (late) wife graduated with Tim Nelson at Holland Hall Prep School in Tulsa. She walked with him at graduation.
He’s also the judge in Idiocracy, where he speaks much the same as the radio station owner.
Another beaut of an idea was to get them some of that “reform”.
I grew up about seven miles from a Piggly-Wiggly.
Yeah, it was a town of 530. My town was a population of 720.
Another favorite quote:
“. . . I nicked the census man.”
“Now there’s a good boy.”
-and-
“Friend, some of your folding money has come unstowed.”
Delmar has a good share of the best quotes.
Wow. A smaller town than me. I grew up in Shattuck, OK. Population: 1200. My high school graduating class had 28 people.
Sorry for the hijack; continue on.
But did you shop the pig?
Growing up in SW VA we primarily shopped at the Piggly Wiggly (as a child I thought calling “Hoggly Woggly” the height of humor). After I moved away, the Food Lion chain seems to have pushed them out of that area and Food City seems to be pushing them out.
In the bluegrass world there was a brief surge of popularity after this, sometimes referred to as POBWATS fans. (post - Oh Brother… Syndrome)
I particularly loved the racist villian: Is you is, or is you ain’t my constituency?
Man, I’ve lived in the South for years, but have you ever heard anything like that sentence before?
Yes, in the 1944 song Is You Is, Or Is You Ain’t My Baby?
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It’s a fun theory, but I think you’re giving Sullivan too much credit. This is the same director who gave us Hey Hey in the Hayloft and Ants in Your Plants of 1939. I doubt he had an O Brother in him.
But just like Ivan Reitman and his son Jason, the Coens may actually be Sullivan’s secret spawn, capable of making the kind of movie their dad never could.
That’s as may be; Sullivan’s Travels is definitely Sturges’s movie–i.e., the writer/director’s–not the character’s. Still, the obvious model of Ants in Your Pants of 1939 (Golddiggers of 1933), is a pretty solid film. I think the same fictional director–how many layers in are we? I’m losing track–could conceivably have come up with a post-epiphany comedy of the Depression-era slog that Brother Where Art Thou–the book–seemed to be.
Keep in mind that if you break *OBWAT *into its component parts, all of them are dreary, Depression-era cliches: chain gang on the run, poverty, corrupt lawmen, etc. It’s only the style with which they’re put together that makes the film a joyous comedy. And yeah, the more I think about it, the more I see that as the Coens’ agenda: “Let’s take all the worst, dreariest possible cliches that must have made up this ‘serious’ book about poverty and the human condition, Brother Where Art Thou, and let’s string them together as Sullivan would’ve after his experience: shoehorn them into a comedy at any cost.” Joking that it was based on Homer’s *Odyssey *is perfect for the Modernist 30s; it’s exactly the kind of thing you’d’ve expected if Sullivan had hired Clifford Odets to adapt the book into a screenplay.
It’s a masterwork. You have seen Sullivan’s Travels, right? If not, go & track it down. It’s a Preston Sturges flick with Veronica Lake & Joel McCrea.
It’s very different, but the two films are closely related.