1941

1941

I don't talk about Steven Spielberg very often, but he's actually the first director I ever loved. I did a project on him in 6th grade, which included dressing up like him (socks with sandals and all) for the presentation portion of said project. Ever since I was 12, working on that project, I've been meaning to see Spielberg's 1941.

It's Spielberg's fourth feature film, right after the monster hits of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He admitted that 1941 was the product of arrogance after having those two hits, so he was looking to do something completely different and landed on doing a giant-budget WWII comedy.

Every critic at the time had the same complaints: there's way too many things going on in every scene, the running time is way too long, and though there's constant hijinks and gags, none of them are actually funny. They nailed it. While all of the destruction is impressive in both scope and quantity, I genuinely laughed maybe twice throughout the entire two and a half hour run time.

Spielberg's not a comedian, and though the screenplay was written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, who at the time had only done comedy films, it still isn't terribly shocking to me that Spielberg didn't churn out a brilliantly funny comedy film. However, there's some things in this movie that simply rub me the wrong way. They constantly use racial slurs for Japanese people, which may be accurate to the time, but is still deeply unpleasant to hear, especially at the rate that they use it. At one point John Candy does blackface in a "mutual" way with a black solider who has white powder on his face, which is still obviously terrible and way past the time of there being any kind of excuse for it. While I believe those issues are justified, my more arbitrary complaint is that I just don't like John Belushi. I've never found him funny or likable, and while knowing how difficult he was in real life certainly doesn't help, I've always felt like his real life scumminess reeks off of his performances.

The cast is huge and impressive, though not always memorable. John Candy barely utters a word, Dan Aykroyd plays a typical soldier, and Christopher Lee is nearly unrecognizable as a Nazi officer. Some of the performances are solid though. Slim Pickens is a lot of fun as always, and the legendary Toshiro Mifune clearly took this job very seriously because he gives it his all. Ned Beatty is also fun as a father who goes insane after a giant military weapon is parked on his front lawn.

Almost all of the gags are bizarre and feel a bit forced, but the moment I found completely insane was the very beginning where Spielberg literally parodies himself with a Jaws-periscope gag. I don't know why, but this completely blew my mind. I can't think of another director who directly spoofed their own work. Sure, there's the fence gags in each of Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy or Wes Craven's New Nightmare, but 1941 is a completely separate film from Jaws and yet this is the very first scene of the movie. I still can't get over it.

1941 is on Bill Hader's list of the 200 movies that every comedy writer should watch, which I understand since it achieved a cult status with his generation, but I would also say it's a decent lesson in what doesn't work in comedy. Having constant gags doesn't automatically make a comedy good, because all of those gags still have to actually be funny.

If you're a huge Spielberg fan and want to see all of his movies you have no choice but to see this, but for anyone else I'd say it's one you can skip.