1941

Once, I thought highly of Steven Spielberg's 1941, a movie that was universally maligned by the critics in 1979 when it was released.  I haven't looked at the movie for 20 years and so was curious to assess my reactions today. 

The actual subject of 1941 is purely abstract:  color and violent motion.  The film's ostensible subject is war hysteria -- a topic that could be considered in the halcyon days post-Vietnam without the admixture of dread and guilt that now complicates the issue.  A group of one-dimensional characters -- each possessing a single salient obsession -- confronts the threat that the Japanese are about to invade southern California.  The story takes place a week after Pearl Harbor and paranoia is rife.  (The film doesn't address the real-life consequence of this war-hysteria -- that is, the interment of citizens of Japanese ethnicity in concentration camps.)  A rogue pilot sets off a scare and the night blazes with anti-aircraft fire over Hollywood.  Meanwhile, a Japanese submarine, captained by Toshiro Mifune (no less!) surfaces off the Santa Monica pier triggering more mayhem.  The air and sea plots converge in Santa Monica with the sub firing torpedos at the amusement park on the pier and the local citizenry blasting away at the Japanese vessel.  The convoluted plot is merely an armature on which to string elaborate and spectacular set-pieces:  planes pursuing one another down Sunset Boulevard decorated for Christmas with guns blazing, machine guns destroying rotund Santa figures, a howitzer fired directly through a suburban home, a vast brawl between hundreds of soldiers, sailors and zoot-suiters, a fully lit Ferris wheel rolling into the ocean, a tank crashing violently through a paint factory, the sky over Los Angeles with bombs bursting in air.  The cast, all of whom are supposed to look goofy and inept, includes John Belushi as the rogue fighter pilot, Dan Ackroyd as a tank commander, Treat Williams playing a lascivious gorilla in pursuit of the leading lady, Joe Flaherty from Second City as a half-Jewish Latin bandleader, Slim Pickins playing a malign yokel, Ned Beatty cast as a citizen-soldier who fires a cannon repeatedly through his house, Sam Fuller (uncredited) as a general in the situation room and Robert Stack playing General Joseph Stilwell, the military man in charge of defending Los Angeles.  These players deliver their lines as if they were appearing in a parody of a parody published in MAD magazine.  At two-hours, the movie now feels to me overlong -- it piles one slapstick calamity onto another until the audience is exhausted.  (As the great silent comedians knew, two reels is the best length for slapstick.)   With its all-star cast and spectacular special effects, achieved through the use of lovingly constructed miniatures (this was before CGI), the film resembles to some degree Stanley Kramer's film cinemascope travesty of slapstick, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World.  As a pure spectacle of light and sound, violent action, and color, parts of the film remain unmatched -- the brawl between the soldiers and sailors with the zoot-suiters attacking from outside is a sequence that remains astounding in its virtuosity at staging ingenious and witty violence:  the whole thing is cut to forties Big Band music and involves complex choreography as well as frenetic chaotic fighting.  Some of the early scenes amply demonstrate Spielberg's obsession with World War II airplanes -- whenever Spielberg can show a WWII "Fighting Fortress" his cinema comes to life:  it's always been my assertion that one of his best films is Empire of the Sun in which the director was able to indulge that obsession in detail.  In Sugarland Express, Spielberg demonstrated that he could stage a car-chase as a waltz or pirouette, as pure rock and roll, and, in fact, at the end of the film, as a tragic elegy.  In 1941, Spielberg choreographs things to dance and spin; he can set up lightning-fast chain-reactions resulting in enormous explosions or small-scale elegant calamities and, further, can approximate the mood of these interacting things to the mood of the film:  a slow-motion chain reaction in the ruins of the dance-hall where the brawl has erupted is a masterpiece, both sad, funny, and intensely moving:  a rolling drum, a string of  Christmas lights, and a punch bowl act together as an ensemble in way that eludes most of Spielberg's live actors. 

Much of what happens in 1941 seems relatively standard today -- in fact, it's the basis for modern action films.  What is important to recognize is that Spielberg, more or less, invented the form with 1941 and, later, Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Before 1941, a movie was supposed to be about recognizable human conflict involving people who were acting on recognizable, even, plausible human motives.  But 1941 drives its plot on an protracted effort at rape, woman's erotic fixation on having sex in airplanes, and a soldier's insane hatred of eggs.  The general who is supposed to be defending Los Angeles spends most of the movie escaping responsibility, sitting in a movie theater watching a Disney movie with vaguely racist overtones.  The general's role, absconding from all responsibility, seems to be a metaphor for Spielberg's participation in this film -- he avoids all responsibility by simply staging one disaster after another, each louder and more spectacular than the last:  he is hiding at the movies.  (Spielberg, famously the product of a broken home, ends the film with an entire stick-built and massive house plunging off a cliff -- an image of a literally "broken home" that seems both intensely personal and a homage to Antonioni's Zabriskie Point.)  Since motion pictures began, there has always been an inner logic and an incentive to make each big-budget production more intense, more fearsome, more extreme in every respect than before.  Although Spielberg certainly didn't invent this tendency (Buster Keaton destroyed an engine and whole train in The General), he perfects it.  1941 is intended to annihilate all previous slapstick films, most particularly Stanley Kramer's Mad World extravaganza.  So similarly, Schindler's List was to be the ne plus ultra of Holocaust movies just as Saving Private Ryan was supposed to represent the ultimate in all war pictures.  George Lucas' Star Wars featured one of the original "canyon dogfights" --- Lucas figured out that to make flying machines feel like they are moving at the utmost speed, they must navigate slot-canyons:  thus Luke Skywalker flying through the mechanized slit in the side of the Death Star.  Spielberg decides to do Lucas one better in 1941 -- not only does he tip his hand by showing Belushi flying through the actual Grand Canyon, he climaxes his film with a dogfight between WW II planes flying at car-antenna height down Sunset Boulevard.  The point is that the logic of movies is to take an episode renowned in previous films and make it more exciting, more violent, more dangerous.  In some ways, therefore, 1941 is true to its intentions:  in this film, Spielberg stages some of the most brilliantly conceived action sequences in film history.  The movie is cold, obvious, inhuman, even, according to contemporary taste, politically incorrect -- there are crude racial jokes, the Japanese are caricatured, and one of the leading men spends the whole movie trying to violently inflict himself sexually on the leading lady -- but as pure massive spectacle much of the film remains unsurpassed.