Why hasn’t Steven Spielberg directed a flat out comedy yet? He’s done everything else under the sun, pulled it off with a fair amount of creative flair and then proceeded to collect the giant piles of money that have followed. If someone can direct one of the highest grossing films ever made, comedy should be a piece of cake! His work has always had a persistent undercurrent of humor, but there’s always a dramatic undercurrent to back it up. I wonder what he’d do if his only mission was to make the audience laugh.
Oh. Wait. He did make a comedy. It was called 1941. People just don't like it very much.
The story follows roughly fifty people (Treat Williams as a sleazy solider and John Belushi as a crazy drugged up fighter pilot being the highlights) caught up in the paranoid frenzy of a fantasy Japanese attack. There’s racial tension, fights, the appearance of an actual Japanese subs and lots of people falling over.
1941 is the unwanted child of people that WANT to make you laugh, but aren’t quite sure how to go about it. They skipped doing their homework and picked up the cliff-notes version instead. What happens when characters, story and structure are thrown out the window and the funny bone is attacked straight away? It gets extremely expensive, exhaustively manic and ear split tingly loud.
I loved every second of it.
1941 could (Some say should) be circled and underlined in film text-books as a complete disaster. The young Spielberg (Fresh off of the massive person success of Close Encounters of the Third Kind) is obviously in way over his head. He squanders his all-star comedy cast, is erratic in the pacing department and answers every single problem by going big. If that dosen't fix it the only recourse is to go even bigger! Yet, that’s exactly the reason I love it. Spielberg’s repertoire of gags may be small, but he sure knows one down pat: If all else fails, break stuff. If that fails, DESTROY FREAKING EVERYTHING! We get a Ferris wheeling crashing into the ocean, a city block gets destroyed by a thousand brawling extras, planes dog fighting downtown and then crashing into streets and an entire life-size house falls off a cliff. Why? Because it’s funny to make things go boom! Most gags fall flat, but there’s no denying the creativity and the technical polish on display (A musical dance fight is the highlight of the entire film) There’s no middle ground here. The assaulted audience has two choices: Give in to the incredibly self indulgent madness ore actively loathes it for because of its many immature faults. I could physically feel the money hemorrhaging on screen as every second ticked by. The film is absurdly long at two hours and a half (Supposedly the set was complete chaos with things being added left and right depending on people’s moods) and I’d heartily recommend you watch it in chunks. Otherwise, you risk the chance of going completely numb.
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