Anthony Bourdain’s favourite comedy movies: “Simply one of the best films ever made”
Reality TV is full of hucksters and fame-seekers, but Anthony Bourdain was different. Part Hunter S Thompson and part Mr Rogers, he was willing to go to the most rugged, far-flung places but never let the adventure get in the way of human connection.
After his career as a chef, working in the lowest and highest-brow establishments, he started publishing essays and books about the hardscrabble reality of working in restaurant kitchens. Taking a tone so blunt and unsanitised that it bordered on poetry, he quickly became one of the most revered voices in the culinary world without ever having published a cookbook or made a poached egg in front of a studio audience.
When he started blending the reality TV genres of travel and food, he became a household name. On his shows No Reservations, The Layover, and Parts Unknown, he visited restaurants around the world, usually off the beaten path. Not surprisingly, he took a rather anarchic approach to the format, spending as much time shooting the breeze with locals as eating and talking about food. As you might expect, his cinematic taste was as adventurous as his approach to life.
In 2011, Bourdain discussed his ten favourite movies with Criterion. His list included perennial arthouse favourites like Eyes Without a Face and Chungking Express, as well as lesser-known gems like The Friends of Eddie Coyle and Army of Shadows. Only two out of the list were comedies, and they speak volumes about the man who chose them—Bruce Robinson’s cult classic Withnail & I and Preston Sturges’s timeless road movie Sullivan’s Travels.
If you haven’t seen Withnail & I, it probably won’t sound very appealing. Two out-of-work actors in grungy 1960s London decide to go on holiday to the Lake District to catch some country air. It’s utterly miserable, so they go back home. That’s it. And yet, the combination of Richard E Grant’s irascibly charismatic performance as the titular Withnail and Robinson’s sharp, surprising, and relentlessly dark script make it a film like no other. Its bleakly hilarious humour belies its humanity, and it demands repeated viewing. Bourdain pronounced it “[o]ne of the funniest goddamn films ever made”.
Sullivan’s Travels is a world away from Withnail. Released in 1941, it follows a bored Hollywood director played by Joel McCrea, who decides he wants to put the shallowness of his popular comedies behind him and make a film that really reflects the state of America. In order to achieve authenticity, he disguises himself as a homeless man and hits the road, hoping to glean some real-world experience about hardship. His adventure takes several unexpected turns, and he eventually finds himself in prison for murder.
In one famous scene, Sullivan and his fellow inmates are granted a brief reprieve from the boredom and austerity of their lives by being allowed to watch a screening of the Disney cartoon Playful Pluto. Sitting in the makeshift cinema surrounded by laughing men, Sullivan has an epiphany. When his wrongful imprisonment is cleared up and he’s back in Hollywood, he reveals that he no longer wants to make a ‘serious’ movie because he has come to realise that making people laugh is a much greater gift than trying to reflect their hardship back at them.
Bourdain didn’t mince words in his praise for the movie: “It’s simply one of the best films ever made—and it perfectly conveys everything you need to know about film. The scene of the convicts watching cartoons is a timeless, classic, and life-enriching moment.” Indeed, that scene is widely regarded as one of the most moving, human, and affirming moments in Hollywood history and one of the greatest illustrations of the power of cinema.
