Steve Drops a Bomb in 1941: SPIELBERG SUMMER Concludes!
Taking Steven Spielberg’s 70s career in its totality, it’s stunning how fully formed he was as a filmmaker essentially right out the gate.
Certainly, there were lessons to be learned about working around both nthe limitations of technology and the increasing scope (and expectations) that comes with success. But, all in all, it didn’t take Spielberg very long to find his voice once he made the jump from television to feature films. All of the hallmarks of what makes a “Steven Spielberg movie” are present basically from DUEL on: fractured families, Everyman protagonists, worlds in constant states of wonder, faceless enemies. From the second his number got called, it seems Spielberg knew what he wanted to say with his chosen art form and found ways to filter himself through all kinds of different genres. Car chase, aquatic thrillers, UFO epics…all of them quite different, yet in their own ways unified.
I mention this because this week, the final week of the First Annual Spielberg Summer, we’re diving into 1941, maybe the singular Spielberg movie that gets referred to as “the bad one”. To be clear, Steven has had his fair share of underwhelming features, but most of them have gone under the radar and subsequently provided the dignity of being forgotten. Not 1941; 45 years later, it’s still synonymous with “Spielberg failure”, undoubtedly aggregated by its lampooning in subsequent wiseguy media throughout the 80’s and 90’s (such as the end of this Animaniacs clip). All of this ensured a generation of kids like me would grow up just assuming 1941 was a piece of shit.
Anyway, I know it sounds like I’m gearing up to provide a full-throated defense of Spielberg’s first (and maybe his only?) out-and-out comedy. I’m not. I watched it. It sucks. But I will say, what kept me engaged with it, more than anything actually happening in a surprisingly heavy-on-its-feet comedy from creative collaborators I otherwise admire, was identifying little thematic elements here and there that still indicated a real filmmaker, one that had changed the industry just a couple of years prior. Although 1941 is an unfixable mess, Spielberg still finds avenues of expression that make it a signature work.
In short, 1941 is a clear failure. Yet, it’s a failure made by an interesting guy with thoughts in his head. And in that sense, is it a success? No. But maybe.
Let’s talk about it.
1941
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Too many to list. Major highlights include: Treat Williams, Toshiro Mifune, Christopher Lee, Tim Matheson, Nancy Allen, Ned Beatty, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd
Written by: Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale
Released: December 14, 1979
Length: 118 mins
The main action of 1941 takes place six days after the infamous Pearl Harbor bombing. The Japanese army has settled on its next area of American soil to attack: Hollywood, CA. What follows is the city’s comical attempts over the course of the day to fortify themselves and prepare to fend off their newfound enemy. Although actually watching the movie makes it difficult to imagine any of the performed beats really happening between any two people that existed in reality, the Zemeckis-Gale screenplay does in fact incorporate some actual historical events, including the Zoot Suit Riots, the Great Los Angeles Air Raid of 1942, and the bombing of the Ellwood oil refinery. Documented evidence of an army secretary being sexually aroused by airplanes sadly remains missing (more on that later).
It would appear that 1941 aspires to be a mix between the 60’s all-star comedy (think along the lines of IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD) and the 60’s all-star war picture (something like THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, perhaps, or maybe THE GREAT ESCAPE). The movie is stuffed to the gills with recognizable faces; besides Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi (who, from the way 1941 is presented, you’d be forgiven for thinking were the main characters), there’s Treat Williams, John Candy, Toshiro Mifune, Christopher Lee, Slim Pickens, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, Michael McKean, David Lander, Robert Stack, Ned Beatty, the famous nerd guy from GREASE who would go on to voice Mandark in DEXTER'S LABORATORY….these are just the ones I was able to think of off the top of my head It’s an enormous cast, and most barely get a chance to shine, much less to get a signature moment.
The problem on the comedy side is that, despite the appreciable amount of on screen ability, the script just isn’t that funny. Jokes come at you constantly, which is probably the correct approach to appropriately build that “epic scale” it so desperately wants to evoke, but hardly anything actually generates a laugh. You definitely want to, you wait for the opportunity to do it, so much do you respect the various talents involved both on and off the camera. But you just don’t. There are isolated ideas that make me chuckle in retrospect (Stack’s hardass Major General character being so moved by DUMBO primary among them), but for the most part, 1941 just sits there covered in flop sweat.
Part of the issue is that the core comedic conceits of many of the characters, when one exists at all, are just kind of bizarre, and borderline unpleasant. Nancy Allen’s Donna Stratton is the aforementioned airplane fetishist, which…look, we don’t kink shame in this space, so this idea in and of itself isn’t necessarily unfunny. But it’s not clear what the movie thinks would be funny about this, outside of “it’s a WWII picture, so there logically would be a lot of airplanes around”. Slim Pickens, seemingly cast in this as a direct reference to his famous role in DR. STRANGELOVE, spends most of his screen time pretending to shit in a toilet. Treat Williams’ whole thing is that he doesn’t like eggs. Laughing yet?
What the film is missing is somebody normal in the middle of it all. Every single character, to a tee, is not somebody one would recognize out in the world; thus, there’s nobody to hang onto and navigate the 1941 universe with. Perhaps the closest is Ned Beatty’s Ward Douglas, whose primary motivation to take up the fight against the enemy is to ensure everyone has a Merry Christmas. But even there, he’s too heightened, in the same way everybody else in this version of Hollywood is heightened. There’s some apt commentary at play there, for sure, but it results in a loss of function.
Worst of all, it’s hard not to feel like the then-up-and-coming comedians are completely wasted, only cast so that the movie can attach itself to rising stars. John Belushi, having already made a name for himself on the early years of Saturday Night Live, been directed by Jack Nicholson, and broke out in film with NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE, is kind of an “you had to be there” comedic figure whose talents were frankly better presented in sketch comedy. He became famous for boisterous, loud characters like the Samurai or the guy who works himself up into a heart attack on Weekend Update. However, I found him most engaging in small sketches that required him to chill out and let his knack for comedic expression come through: this sweet and precise laundromat scene he did with Gilda Radner is one of the great unsung Golden Era SNL skits. So it’s a shame that his big ask in 1941 is just to be a broad “wild person”. Aykroyd, his SNL costar and always my favorite of the two, is appropriately cast as a fast talking military man, but with nary a memorable line to use his silver tongue on. John Candy, one of the funniest people on the planet in 1979, makes so little of an impression, you somehow forget he’s there at all. Waste after waste after waste.
*I’m sorry to report that his work as Bluto in ANIMAL HOUSE has aged about as well as Belushi himself.
On the non-comedic side, it’s a tragedy that Toshiro Mifune and Christopher Lee are featured so prominently and are also given nothing interesting or memorable to do. It especially hurts in Mifune’s case, considering he’s easily the biggest star (and the best actor) Spielberg had gotten to direct up to this point, AND considering Mifune didn’t make American productions all that often. Lee camps it up as much as he can as the evil German General Von Kleinschmidt, but again, there’s not a lot of room for him to shine through the chaos.
What surprised me more than anything else was 1941’s inability to really build anything comedically. Spielberg is normally a master at the “set up, escalation, payoff” style of action filmmaking; his next film, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, would be almost exclusively made up of this kind of thing (think about that famous truck chase sequence), and it’s the reason that the initial Indiana Jones adventure may be the director’s finest work of them all. I’d go one step further and say that his ability to tell stories through motion may be Spielberg’s ultimate legacy when all is said and done.
But, for whatever reason, when applied to long-form comedy, you can feel Spielberg struggle. It’s not that he CAN’T be funny; his most popular films have little moments of comedy throughout (who can forget the “objects in the mirror are closer than they appear” shot in JURASSIC PARK?). But the “epic comedy” reveals itself to be a poor fit. Not all of that is Spelberg’s fault, per se; after all, he didn’t write the jokes. But Spielberg doesn’t ever seem to land on a tone that fits, and eventually just settles for “big”. It’s no coincidence that the end credits sequence, one of those fun ones where the actor’s name comes attached with a clip from the movie, is almost exclusively shots of people screaming. With nothing else to work with, Spielberg just leans into the excess and hopes for the best.
(I should mention here that, again, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale wrote this fucking thing! The BACK TO THE FUTURE trilogy alone stands as proof enough that they’re not exactly hacks or anything, so I was rattled at how desperate the comedy felt in this.)
The closest Spielberg gets to achieving his signature climbing scope is in a major dance sequence at a nightclub that morphs into an all out brawl, growing from a fight between Bobby di Ciccio and Treat Williams over Dianne Kay. It’s easily the most “Spielbergian” scene of the movie, as the camera confidently swoops around the dance hall, people’s swinging movements (whether fighting or dancing) timed just so to the band music. Best of all, the amount of people fighting seems to grow almost imperceptibly over the course of the sequence until it’s practically everybody throwing blows at each other. It’s worth noting that, although this is the kind of thing he’d eventually make his bread and butter, there really wasn’t anything like this in Spielberg’s previous films (DUEL, THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS, JAWS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS). Even in a flop outing, Spielberg shows an ability to grow and develop as an artist.
With that said, I did genuinely get a kick out of seeing darker themes within 1941 leak through, the sort of things Spielberg would eventually begin tackling head on instead of highlighting within the margins. A minor character that stood out to me was Joe Flaherty’s nightclub host Sal Stewart, who offhandedly remarks in a moment of downtime that his real name is Raoul Lipschitz. Even in the context of a broad, screamy farce, Spielberg can’t help but point out the very real darkness for many in the advent of a second World War, where de-emphasized Jewishness is a survival tactic. And, of course, 1941 marks the first appearance of a common villain in the Spielberg-verse: the Nazis. The threat of fascism in Spielberg’s filmography encroaches further and further as we work through the 80s and into the 90s. But, for now, they remain the same level of conniving, borderline incompetent cannon fodder that they’ll eventually be in the INDIANA JONES films, which is frankly more respect than they’ve ever deserved.
In the grand scope of Spielberg’s career, 1941 stands out as the first prominent creative failure in his canon. However, it’s important to note a couple of final things. First, it wasn’t really a bomb at the time; it just wasn’t the free-money-generating enterprise that JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS were. 1941 made $94 million compared to the $35 million it took to make it, which is solidly in the green. I suspect the bigger concern to the Powers That Be is that the increase in budget didn’t lead to higher profit. But audiences didn’t appear to necessarily hate it at the time! As well, a quick scan of the YouTube comments underneath the clips that Universal has uploaded to YouTube would indicate that 1941 has its fans and admirers to this day. Some claim that the director’s cut, which runs just under two and a half hours, is superior. I’ll have to take their word for it at this point in time.
So, 1941. Not a masterpiece, unfortunately, and in some ways, a deflating way to end the first Spielberg Summer in this space, especially knowing what’s to come next year. Still, without these disappointments, some valuable lessons may never be learned. Spielberg himself admitted that, where the success of JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS taught him to hold on to as much control as possible over every aspect of a film, the failure of 1941 taught him when to delegate to second-unit directors, as he declined to do with the miniatures this time around. It’s not the movie Spielberg hates the most (by all accounts, that would be 1991’s HOOK). He’s not even particularly embarrassed by it. He just wishes it was funnier.
That makes two of us.