It sparked a whole revival of American roots music, spawning a Grammy-winning album and a couple of concert tours featuring the soundtrack artists. The "old-timey" blues, folk, gospel and country that fills the soundtrack was not just an integral part of the film. "I just did my Uncle Jack through the whole thing." "I sent him a tape recorder with a script and asked him to read all of my lines," he told an interviewer. The actor, who grew up in Kentucky, jumped on the project and embraced the role of the pomade-addicted convict, and he turned to his uncle for help in mastering the accent he'd lost long ago. In Clooney, they found a star with the look of a thirties matinee idol and the snappy delivery of a seasoned Hollywood comic. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is populated with familiar faces from previous Coen films-Hunter, Goodman, Turturro, Charles Durning, Michael Badalucco-but it's their first collaboration with Clooney, who was their first choice for the lead. Despite the heavy-hearted title, their depression road movie is lighthearted and whimsical and filled with infectious music. In that film, Sullivan has a change of heart when he sees the joy that comedies bring even the most wretched souls. It's the name of the social drama that earnest, ambitious Hollywood comedy director John Sullivan so desperately wants to make that he hits the road as a hobo to learn the hardscrabble human condition first hand. And the title comes from one of the great depression comedies of all time: Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels (1941). Hillbilly humor and screwball scenes play out in surreal imagery. Colorful tidbits from real-life southern politics and good 'ol boy populism of the thirties and forties make up the crazy quilt backdrop of their adventure. They pick up a blues guitarist (Chris Thomas King) on his way to the crossroads to seal his deal with the devil (a classic blues legend), tag along with Baby Face Nelson on a bank robbery spree ("My name is George Nelson! Not Baby Face!") and crash a Ku Klux Klan rally that looks like a marching band halftime show and plays out like a scene from The Wizard of Oz (1939). Yet Homer's epic poem is merely one of many inspirations for a film that Joel described as "the Lawrence of Arabia of hayseed comedies." You could call the opening scenes a Three Stooges version of I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932).
"But we read the comic book version of The Odyssey," confessed Ethan, as well as saw Hollywood spectacles and Ray Harryhausen fantasies based on, inspired by or selectively cribbed from it.
It has a remarkable (if playfully skewed) fidelity to the epic poem of mythical struggle, even if the filmmaking brother act never actually read Homer's work (as they take pains to point out). Did I mention that Everett's given name is Ulysses? Along the way they have their fates foretold by a blind seer, become enchanted by the seductive song of three women washing in the river (the Sirens), are attacked by a giant of a one-eyed salesman (John Goodman, standing in for the Cyclops) and race to Everett's home town to stop his abandoned wife, Penny (Holly Hunter as a tart Penelope), from marrying another man. Once they throw off those chains, he appoints himself leader of their quest to uncover a buried treasure in a valley scheduled to be flooded. And drag them he does, almost literally, as they are chained together in those opening scenes. George Clooney comes on like a goofball Clark Gable as the fast-talking but slow-witted convict Everett, a greasy con-man who escapes from a chain gang, dragging along a couple of dim bulbs (a tetchy John Turturro and a sweetly stupid Tim Blake Nelson, both of whom spend much of the film with mouths agape and eyes glazed over). In the opening credits of Joel and Ethan Coen's, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, their 2000 depression-era prison break movie-turned-screwball odyssey through the deep south, is the attribution: "Based upon The Odyssey by Homer." It's a cheeky proclamation and it doesn't take a classical scholar to note that, if it's indeed true, they've taken liberties with the material.