You would be hard-pressed to find a movie director more accomplished than Steven Spielberg. He has put his mark on every movie genre one can think of, with the lone exception being the Western (and even that is in the process of being remedied). But if we’re talking about genres that he has successfully taken on, there is one genre that Spielberg has tried his hand at only once, and failed at spectacularly: comedy. A straightforward comedy, that is, with 1979’s 1941 marking his only venture into comedy.
‘1941’ Places Spectacle Over Story
1941 is loosely structured around the mass hysteria in the Los Angeles area following the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, with “loosely” the operative word. As co-writer Robert Zemeckis tells it, the movie is based on three actual historical events. The first is the sighting of a Japanese submarine off the coast of Santa Barbara in February 1942. The second is known as “The Great Los Angeles Air Raid,” which occurred a day and a half later. As the story goes, people were so nervous that someone started shooting into the sky, setting off a panic that had Angelenos firing at non-existent enemy aircraft for five straight hours. The third was the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, when Los Angeles servicemen clashed with minority youths wearing the era’s rebellious zoot suits.
Building a comedy around one, let alone all three, would be a tall order, and the first sign that Spielberg should have pulled the plug on 1941 was the reaction of Hollywood legends John Wayne and Charlton Heston, plan A and B for the character of General Stillwell. Both saw the film as dishonorable to the memory of World War II, a slap in the face of America, and both pleaded with Spielberg not to make the movie (per Empire). But with comic talents like John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and John Candy (and a humorous turn from Robert Stack, who, as Stillwell, repeatedly gets denied the chance to watch Dumbo unimpeded).
But Spielberg himself, in Empire, admits he never really had a clear vision for 1941, and it shows. Heavy doses of chaos and slapstick are relied upon for the comedy, and Belushi is really the only cast member playing to his strengths as Captain “Wild Bill” Kelso, who is on a mad quest to hunt down Japanese forces in his warplane. Yet there are big, genuinely funny set pieces crafted by Spielberg that are magnificent to watch, too: The Japanese submarine shooting at a Ferris wheel that comes off its moorings, rolls down the pier and into the ocean; an intricately set-up gag that ends with a falling chandelier on Treat Williams‘ antagonist Corporal Sitarski; and a dogfight – well, Kelso firing on an unarmed American plane – up and down Hollywood Boulevard. Still, spectacular set pieces and chaos do not a comedy make.
Steven Spielberg Learns a Lesson from ‘1941’
It’s not entirely fair to call 1941 a failure: the film, considered a cult classic, actually did make a modest profit, and the visual effects, cinematography and sound were all nominated for Academy Awards. However, relative to his previous two films – Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, respectively – 1941 was a misstep that carried with it the “greatest lesson” of Spielberg’s career. In a 2006 interview with the Directors Guild of America, Spielberg admitted to feeling like he was “made of Teflon” heading into filming 1941. The success of the previous two films gave him the feeling that anything he did would simply succeed, that every laugh set up would receive not only a laugh, but huge applause. Academy Awards, meanwhile, were a given.
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Needless to say, that didn’t happen. In the same interview, Spielberg says that in looking back, he spent far too much time trying to get everything right, unwilling to share the workload with anyone. He cites having taken 20 takes on inserts as one example of work that should have been done by a second unit, only he couldn’t let it go. “I learned the greatest lesson of my career, just from the experience of 1941,” Spielberg says, “and by the time I did Raiders of the Lost Ark, my next picture, I was humbled.” And where 1941 went well over schedule, even further than on the tempestuous production that was Jaws, Spielberg brought Raiders of the Lost Ark in 14 days under schedule. Lesson learned.
That 1941 soured Spielberg on trying another comedy, though, is an outright sin. As a more mature director, he knows that there has to be more than a loosely connected run of spectacle and chaos for a comedy to work. And with films like Ready Player One, he’s also shown that he’s willing to work on movies outside pure Oscar-bait, just for the joy of filmmaking, so perhaps the door on comedy isn’t fully closed. In fact, 1941 might have a big clue as to who Spielberg could parody in a comedy: himself. The opening scene is a full-on parody of the opening of Jaws, which includes Susan Backlinie, the actress who played the doomed Chrissie (only a Japanese sub instead of a shark), while the desert gas station Kelso lands at for fuel is the same one from Spielberg’s Duel, and again features the same actress in both: Lucille Benson.
