1941 (1979)

Yep...this is the movie blog, since it'd be kind of dumb to include it on DBall or Soundiscovery. Anyway, I was pretty young when I first saw 1941. It was on Disney Channel or something and I'd seen in the Disney Channel TV guide that it had a whole bunch of famous people...John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Christopher Lee, Ned Beatty. I was in fourth grade and I was going through a "Hollywood" phase, where I was just interested in which actors were in which movies and who made them. When the Oscars were on in '94, I wrote down every winner. I don't know why I did that...it felt weird, but I was still really interested. Had no idea what that kind of knowledge would be good for. Then about four years later, I saw a little movie by a little director named Steven Spielberg that was called Raiders of the Lost Ark and from then on, I decided I wanted to be like Spielberg. This meant watching his movies...which meant revisiting 1941.

At the time it was released, 1941 was considered Spielberg's first flop. Sure, it's kind of an awkward movie, but I don't think people were ready for it. Even Spielberg himself. Up to that point, he'd made two huge epic movies about a shark and aliens, wowed everybody, and people thought he was unstoppable. Then he tried something just as ambitious, but it just didn't register with audiences. Looking back on it, I'm not quite sure why 1941 isn't as good as Jaws or Close Encounters. I suppose if I had to pick something, it was the multiple protagonists and their antics that took away from our relating to them and their quest to defeat the Japanese. In Spielberg's prior movies, each one was incredible because he knew how to really focus on the protagonist and their struggle to either defeat an unprovoked enemy or claim a missing part of themselves that had been taken from them. 1941 still had that collective focus/goal amongst the characters who wanted to reclaim their security, but cast members like John Belushi and Slim Pickens and a hilarious script from the Bobs (Gale and Zemeckis) stole the show from Spielberg. Even as a background player, though, his skill to made this movie work. While audiences may have expected more from him at the time, in hindsight, it's easy to appreciate the collaboration between so many of Hollywood's greatest talents alive in the late-'70s.

This collaboration would be a precursor to Back to the Future for USC classmates Steven Spielberg, Bob Zemeckis, and Bob Gale. For me, that makes me give this movie more of a chance, seeing as how that triumvirate created cinematic gold with Back to the Future. If you listen to the dialogue closely in both this movie and the Back to the Future films, you can tell a dead-on resemblence between the two. Most of the characters are zany, idiotic, and colorful buffoons that could keep you in stitches by just reading a cereal box. The casting of this film is also very hit or miss. There are two classes to the cast: the celebrities and the actors. The "celebrities" would be Belushi, Aykroyd, Ned Beatty, Robert Stack, Christopher Lee, Slim Pickens, and Toshirô Mifune (Mifune, for cripes sake!). Then, you've got your regular actors like Tim Matheson, Nancy Allen, and Treat Williams, who merely fill roles and waste time. What's fun about the casting is picking out all the movies the major cast members have starred in together. Here's a list:

• John "Joliet Jake" Belushi & Dan "Elwood" Aykroyd...The Blues Brothers (which has a cameo by Spielberg and is directed by John Landis who has a cameo in 1941)
• Dan Aykroyd & John Candy...The Great Outdoors
• Murray Hamilton & Lorraine Gary & Susan Backlinie (the naked woman "attacked" by the U-boat at the beginning)...Jaws (by Spielberg)
• John Candy & Joe Flaherty & Tim Matheson...Speed Zone (okay, a lame movie, but Candy & Flaherty did do SCTV which was awesome)

Another thing that might attribute to the awkwardness of the movie is that this film was originally intended to be a musical, just like another ambitious-but-floppy Spielberg film, Hook. A few scenes are just short of breaking into song, but they don't really fall flat. They just get in the way of the comedy. The "Swing, Swing, Swing" number in 1941 could definitely be compared to "Johnny B. Goode" from Back to the Future, with the pacing and the tone, but "Swing, Swing, Swing" isn't as fun because it feels generic and the story's not woven into it like in Back to the Future.

In the end, you could call 1941 the poor man's Dr. Strangelove (both with Slim Pickens!). I would recommend this to anyone who rabidly loves Back to the Future, Steven Spielberg, SNL and SCTV, and/or Slim Pickens.