1941
Steven Spielberg and comedy. The director and genre have never really mixed well. Yes, Spielberg has had moments of great humor and wit in a lot of his films, but the two-time Oscar winner has never really been a comedic director. Finally watching his 1979 misfire, “1941,” for the first time, it’s easy to see why– even with a largely comedic screenplay by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, Spielberg comes naturally to serious drama, but when it comes to humor, he seems to labor with comedy set pieces and tone for a sustained amount of time.
The film starts out well, though. We are told after the Universal Pictures logo that it is a time after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and that the armed forces are on high alert on the West Coast, while California is in a state of panic, thinking that will be the Japanese’s next target. Meanwhile, a young woman, who looks suspiciously like Chrissy Watkins (the victim at the start of “Jaws”), goes skinny-dipping. Well, she is in for a surprise, but it’s no shark. Worse, it’s the Japanese, and under the command of Cmdr. Akiro Mitamura (played by Kurosawa veteran Toshirô Mifune), they are intent on attacking the mainland, and in particular, Hollywood. No, that doesn’t sound good, but how much better is it when you consider the soldiers in charge of defending the coast include Sgt. Frank Tree (Dan Aykroyd), Capt. Wild Bill Kelso (John Belushi), and Pvt. Foley (John Candy), all of whom are established as maybe not the best of the best.
This was Spielberg’s fourth feature, after “The Sugarland Express,” “Jaws,” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” the latter two establishing him as one of the greatest directors to come out of the ’70s. It’s understandable that he was pretty confident coming off of the stunning success of “Jaws” and “Close Encounters”; as he would admit in the 2007 documentary, “Spielberg on Spielberg,” he thought he was made of Teflon going into “1941,” that he could do no wrong. What he seems to be going for with “1941” is his own “Dr. Strangelove” (he even has Slim Pickens as a truck driver taken prisoner by the Japanese), a look at the absurdities of war through literally absurd situations, but what he ends up with is a film that lacks narrative control, and comedic timing. Spielberg had the clout at the time to have things his way, to be sure (and in “Spielberg on Spielberg,” he’ll admit he might have taken the reins too much), but didn’t have the discipline to make it work the same way Kubrick did in “Strangelove.” Maybe after his next two films, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial,” he would have, but films come at certain times for a reason, and even Spielberg admits that he learned some of his best lessons because of it’s failure.
The biggest problem with “1941” isn’t a lack of laughs, although there aren’t as many as Spielberg, Zemeckis, and Gale are going for, but a lack of focus. There are a lot of characters that some might consider “main” characters, and definitely a lot of well-known actors in it, including not just Belushi, Aykroyd, Candy, and Mifune, but Christopher Lee as a Nazi envoy to the Japanese; Robert Stack as the Major General in charge in California; Nancy Allen as a reporter with a thing for planes; and Ned Beatty as a father whose house is strategically ideal for an anti-aircraft gun. But what’s the main story here? Who are we supposed to be following? Which characters are meant to be our surrogates for this film, our “way in” to the story, as it were? When he worked with big casts in later films (thinking “Saving Private Ryan,” “Amistad,” and “War Horse”), we may have different characters we follow at different times, but we always know what the story is that’s being told. Spielberg seemed uncertain here, more interested in the “big picture” than a personal story, and the result is simply a collection of scenes and vignettes that isn’t tied together by a real narrative. The result is the most chaotic film of Spielberg’s career, and certainly the one that seems least like the A-list Spielberg we’re used to.
No director is perfect– no director who works as long making movies as Spielberg has lacks a dud or two in their filmmography. “1941” is one of Spielberg’s. Unfocused from a storytelling standpoint, it’s also not terribly funny, and very easy to check out during the mania of the second half of the film. It’s not the only time Spielberg has learned more towards comedy than drama in his career (although “Catch Me if You Can” and “The Terminal,” his other “comedies,” work better when they hue closer to emotional parts of their stories), but he’s much more adept at drama, adventure, and fantasy than he is at straight comedy. Spielberg seemed to figure this out quite well after “1941” crashed and burn, if you’ll forgive the phrasing, and the result after this film has been a director smart enough to play to his strengths, but also enough of a risk-taker to occasionally challenge himself when it suits him. That’s made the past 35 years of Spielberg cinema quite an enriching experience, whether it’s been a “perfect” 35 years or not.
