'1941' movie review

(C) 1979 Universal Pictures

1941 (1979)

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, based on a story by Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale, and John Milius

Starring: Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, Ned Beatty, Nancy Allen, Lorraine Gary, Wendie Jo Sperber, Dianne Kay, Murray Hamilton, Toshiro Mifune, Christopher Lee, Slim Pickens

[reporting over the radio on a riot at the USO]

Raoul Lipschitz: Ladies and gentlemen, every where I look... soldiers are fighting sailors, sailors are fighting Marines! Directly in front of me, I see a flying blond floozy! Everywhere I look... everywhere, pure pandemonium... pandemonium!

Steven Spielberg is doubtlessly  one of the most popular and influential filmmakers in the history of the movie industry. As a member of the New Hollywood group of directors and producers that emerged in the 1970s, Spielberg has helmed such successful films as Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T.  the Extra-Terrestrial, the four Indiana Jones movies (1981-2008), and Jurassic Park. He has also  won two Best Director  Academy Awards  (for Schindler’s List, 1993 and Saving Private Ryan, 1998). Over the past 40 years, all of the movies directed by Spielberg have grossed over $8.5 billion worldwide.

However, not every film directed by Steven Spielberg is as well-made or as popular as Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Lincoln.

Spielberg’s 1979 World War II farce 1941 is one of the filmmaker’s rare critical and popular misfires. Although it is not technically a box office flop (it grossed $94 million worldwide), 1941 did not perform as well as Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, 1941 is a sprawling ensemble period comedy set in Los Angeles shortly after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Angry, bewildered, and panicky, millions of Southern Californians watch the skies for signs of enemy bombers and brace for a  seaborne Japanese invasion.

Like the rest of the nation, the City of Angels is swept up in a heady mix of patriotism, war fever, and hysteria. Thousands of young Americans are enlisting in the armed forces or joining support organizations such as the USO, and those few that don’t are treated as un-American malingerers or worse. Ordinary citizens like Ward Douglas (Ned Beatty) are even willing to allow the Army to place 40-mm antiaircraft guns on their front lawns to repel the enemy imagined to be lurking offshore.

There are no waves of Japanese Zeroes or any armadas of troop-laden transports off the beaches of Santa Monica. But when a lone Japanese submarine surfaces off the coast on a quixotic mission to shell Hollywood, all hell breaks loose in a mix of war jitters, brawls between GIs and “zoot-suit” wearing Latino youths, and a barrage of flak over Hollywood Boulevard.

My Take

More a collection of loosely connected comedy sketches than a movie with a coherent narrative, 1941 is not Spielberg’s finest cinematic hour. It is frenetically paced and chock full of sight gags and pop culture references, but, with rare exceptions, it is not a funny movie.

Captain Wild Bill Kelso: [after parking his fighter plane in front of a gas station with the engine running] Fill her up! Ethel!

Gas Mama: Where?

What humor is to be had comes from watching  P-40 pilot Capt. Wild Bill Kelso (John Belushi) as he flies across Southern California in search of the enemy. As played by the late Saturday Night Live star, Wild Bill is the perfect incarnation of the film’s preoccupation with phantom Japanese attackers. He’s paranoid, delusional, yet courageous and determined to take the fight to the enemy.

As for the rest of 1941, it tries too hard to show viewers how badly spooked Americans were after Pearl Harbor while at the same time giving them a zany screwball comedy.

Conceptually, the movie has comedic potential. To create a WWII-themed farce,  Spielberg, Zemeckis, and Gale mix elements from such real-life events as the Great Los Angeles Air Raid of 1942, the 1944 Zoot Suit Riots, and several attempts by Japanese subs to shell facilities on the West Coast and tie them to a wild and woolly dance contest/barroom brawl.  

But without a coherent plot or even a likeable central character for the audience to identify with, 1941 is a noisy, splashy, and uneven effects-filled mess that seems to have gotten out of Spielberg’s control.

There are many reasons why I don’t find 1941 terribly amusing. Sure, Zemeckis and Gale (with an assist from John Milius, who co-wrote the story on which the script is based) give viewers some inspired bits; a few tips of the hat to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Spielberg’s Jaws are clever and get genuine laughs.

For the most part, though, I don’t care much for the misadventures of Wally Stephens (Bobby Di Cicco), a ne’er-do-well teenager whose only thoughts are of taking Betty Douglas (Dianne Kay) to a big dance contest. The character’s self-absorption and his Wile E. Coyote-Road Runner-like  enmity with Corporal Chuck "Stretch" Sitarski (Treat Williams) are off-putting.

The movie’s weakest link is the pairing of Eddie Deezen as Herbie Kazlminsky and Murray Hamilton as Claude Crumm. Herbie is a nasal-voiced doofus who pairs off with the long-suffering and acrophobic Claude as air raid spotters on a Ferris wheel. They’re in just a handful of short scenes, but Deezen’s loud and whiny comments are annoying instead of being hilarious.

Perhaps the only good things that came out of 1941 are John Williams’ 1940s-flavored score and a deleted scene with a coat hanger sight gag.

1941 was the fourth film in which Williams collaborated with Spielberg, and he composed several memorable themes for this big-budget ($35 million) extravaganza. The best-known is Williams’ “March from 1941” a military-sounding composition that nevertheless reflects the film’s irreverent tone.

And the excised coat hanger sight gag? In the behind the scenes documentary by Laurent Bouzereau, Spielberg admits that it was deleted because did not work as well as he’d  hoped in 1941. Nevertheless, the director liked the joke and promised himself that he’d try adding it to every film he made until it did work.

Happily, he did not have to wait too long. The coat hanger gag was included in Spielberg’s next film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and is one of the funniest bits in the action-adventure classic.

Blu-ray Specifications

Extra Features

The Making of 1941

Deleted Scenes

Production Photographs

Theatrical Trailers

Video Codec: MPEG-4 AVC (27.18 Mbps) Resolution: 1080p Aspect ratio: 2.35:1 Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1 Audio English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit) Subtitles English SDH, French, Spanish Discs 50GB Blu-ray Disc Single disc (1 BD) Playback Region A

Miscellaneous

• Rated: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Studio: Universal Studios
• Blu-ray Release Date: May 5, 2015
• Run Time: 265 minutes