The Giddy Delights of “1941”

Little did I know, when, in December, 1979, I saw Steven Spielberg’s new film, “1941”—in 70-mm., on the curved screen of the Cinema 150 theatre, in Woodbury, Long Island— that I was witnessing a psychodrama of historic proportions. With a retrospective of Spielberg’s films opening at Film Forum (it runs through September 12th), the memory of that viewing, with its jolts of giddy delight, becomes all the more poignant. “1941” is my favorite film of Spielberg’s. It may not be his most personal movie (“The Fabelmans” is his family story, after all), but it’s the one in which he shows the most of his inner life—maybe even more than he intended. In “1941,” he lets his manic, movie-loving inner child loose and avows far more about his love of movies—and its connection to his fundamental worldview—than was prudent. It’s the film in which he lets himself go, in which he displays his cinematic id, and it’s perhaps the only one in which he suggests that he has an id at all. Yet the part of Spielberg that was unleashed proved unpopular. Critics panned “1941,” and, though it was neither a blockbuster nor a financial flop, it was a big disappointment after the smash hits of “Jaws” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Spielberg, chastened, never cut loose again.

The premise of “1941” is, if not exactly offensive, cheerfully frivolous, in the vein of, say, the TV show “Hogan’s Heroes”: it’s a comedy about the entry of the United States into the Second World War, days after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. (The film was loosely inspired by civil-defense mobilizations that took place in California, in preparation for a possible Japanese attack on the West Coast.) Working with a script by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, based on a story they’d written with John Milius, Spielberg brings together a teeming array of characters whose sense of purpose range from the fiercely martial and the steadfastly patriotic to the charmingly romantic and the brashly sexual. Converging thanks to a series of extravagant coincidences, they cause large-scale destruction in various Los Angeles venues where nobody gets seriously hurt.

The military action is launched by the arrival of a real-life figure, the crusty General Joseph W. Stilwell (Robert Stack), who has been sent to reassure the public but who, after a flurry of pronouncements and his flurry of orders, puts his duties aside for a screening of “Dumbo” at a theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Stilwell’s aide, Captain Loomis Birkhead (Tim Matheson), is desperate to reëngage with a sort-of ex, Stilwell’s secretary, Donna Stratton (Nancy Allen), who has a fetish for airplanes—indeed, claims to get no pleasure except when airborne. The soldiers cross paths with a civilian named Wally (Bobby Di Cicco), a dishwasher slash waiter slash wannabe hipster who has a thing for dancing and is secretly dating a woman, Betty Douglas (Dianne Kay), whose father, Ward (Ned Beatty), despises him. An Army delegation persuades Ward, whose house is perched on the Santa Monica waterfront, to let a huge anti-aircraft cannon be placed on his lawn. A member of the delegation, Corporal “Stretch” Sitarski (Treat Williams), instantly falls for Betty; her best friend, Maxine (Wendie Jo Sperber), instantly falls for him. The three of them meet up at a U.S.O. dance in a ballroom where the women work as hostesses entertaining uniformed servicemen. Wally, worried that he’ll lose Betty to Stretch, frantically schemes to find a uniform and get in.

Roiling the armed forces from the skies is Captain Wild Bill Kelso (John Belushi), an unhinged pilot who rants with cigar in mouth and squeaky toy in pocket, hoping to take the battle to Japanese invaders. Civil defense proves equally antic, as two Santa Monica locals, Claude (Murray Hamilton) and his loopy grown son Herb (Eddie Deezen), are handed weapons, brought to an amusement park, and posted overnight in a Ferris wheel, high above the ground, to keep watch. Meanwhile, there really is a Japanese submarine looming off the coast with a German officer aboard. The Axis mission is to destroy Hollywood in order to deflate American morale and achieve a symbolic victory.

All of which is to say that the film is centered on the allure and the importance of Hollywood—and it’s situated in a world that bears no resemblance to any part of reality other than the substance and the power of Hollywood movies themselves. Spielberg makes sure that viewers recognize this cinema-centric artificiality from the very start, with a “Jaws” parody: a woman swimming alone in frigid waters has a terrifyingly close encounter with the surfacing submarine, during which a Japanese crew member gazing at her gleefully calls out, “Hollywood!” The Hollywood that Spielberg celebrates is that of its classic-era directors—a Hollywood that he evidently sees himself as heir to. When Wild Bill lands his airplane at a remote gas station to refuel, the resulting catastrophe is a parody of the gas-station conflagration in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” However, where Hitchcock produces a vision of frozen horror, Spielberg simply delivers the regressive pleasure of explosions and flames. Kelso, whose reckless gunplay is to blame, hustles off to his plane with the awkward indifference of a toddler.

The scale of “1941” is colossal. Cityscape exteriors extend far along avenues and across office-building rooftops as backdrops for tumultuous action on land and in air—precision stunts, chaotic crowd scenes, aeronautical ballets, and chases by car and tank and motorcycle. Yet the film’s mighty and meticulous craft is largely in the service of primal gratifications and crude effects, which are rendered no less regressive by the Rube Goldberg-esque intricacy of the physical chains of causality giving rise to them. The emotional world mirrors that of “Looney Tunes,” and, indeed, its main cinematic forebear is a great comedy director who got his start as an animator and director on “Looney Tunes”: Frank Tashlin. Tashlin directed six of Jerry Lewis’s early films, and, though Lewis isn’t in “1941,” his comic persona, which Tashlin had a decisive role in forming, looms large. (The goofy character of Herb, a childlike chatterbox, is essentially a Lewis surrogate, his name borrowed from Lewis’s character in “The Ladies Man.”)

What Spielberg’s movie takes from Lewis is a sense of innocence, the liberation of the inner child. But Lewis’s inner child is a lost soul, browbeaten and disdained, a social outcast who is nonetheless redeemed by his steadfast sweetness and instinctive empathy. To which Spielberg’s response, more or less, is “Bah humbug.” He takes the anarchy unleashed by Lewis and Tashlin and strips its innocence of empathy. The Spielberg child is a wild child of ravenous desire and oblivious determination, willing to blow up the world to get his way. The actual children in the film are cruel, violent, and willful. They are delighted when Betty and Maxine fall painfully into a booby trap meant for Japanese invaders; they cheer Ward on when he blasts away with powerful weaponry; and it is a child’s knowing and ornery defiance that brings about the spectacular destruction in which the film culminates. Yet Spielberg, delighting in such destruction, displays no cruel pleasure in any pain or harm it would presumably cause. Rather, he displays gleeful indifference to suffering, by flamboyantly exerting the power of his cinematic art and authority—to leave it out of the script, to keep it outside the frame, to edit it out.

The movie’s sexual politics, much like its military action, is a matter of adult objectives pursued by childish means. Men and women alike leer and scheme, grab and paw, literally chase one another around—and these sexual tangles also give rise to cartoonish chaos. (The finest, subtlest performance in the movie is that of Sperber, as Maxine, who, with a repertory of furtive caresses, calls and sighs and imbues feral desire with pathos.) In one of these tangles, there’s an unlikely but unmistakable homage to John Cassavetes’s film “Opening Night,” as if winking at the adult stakes underlying these childish characters’ exertions. But that is a fleeting moment, whereas the film as a whole, revolving around the sexual competition of Stretch and Wally, is an homage to a director who is Spielberg’s overarching, career-long reference: John Ford.

Spielberg makes this cinematic daddy complex explicit at the end of “The Fabelmans,” when the college-age protagonist, Spielberg’s alter ego, visits a Hollywood studio in the mid-nineteen-sixties and meets the aged Ford (played by David Lynch). In “1941,” the U.S.O. dance devolves into a fight between soldiers and sailors that’s borrowed from a donnybrook in Ford’s 1957 military drama, “The Wings of Eagles,” about (yes) a naval commander who becomes a Hollywood screenwriter. For Spielberg, the fight, already somewhat comedic in Ford’s film, turns loopy, taking place amid a jitterbug dance-off for which the prize is a Hollywood contract. (To make the Ford homage even clearer, Spielberg pairs it with a musical quotation, from the bubbly and catchy score for a fight scene in Ford’s 1952 romantic comedy-drama, “The Quiet Man.”)

Ford, of course, is a tragedian, even in his comedies; his pugnacious and valorous characters always run the risk of hubris, often ending up exiled or self-exiled from the community. Not Spielberg, with his happy warriors; he’s having too much fun to worry. With all the fighting and explosions, crashes and conflagrations, bonks on the head and lights in the sky, he is having the time of his life—not even a second childhood but the first childhood that he missed (see “The Fabelmans”) when he was a serious and ambitious young filmmaker. In “1941,” his principles are limited to the freewheeling virtues of the cinema itself. The movie’s most rousing moment, its call to arms in the face of trouble, is a bombastic defense of the childish side of Hollywood. (“Do you think the Krauts believe in Walt Disney?”) Orson Welles famously called a movie set “the biggest electric train set any boy ever had,” but he never made films boyishly. Spielberg, by contrast, did exactly that in “1941,” treating the panoply of sophisticated equipment like a toy chest and unleashing the full artistic force of his inspired callowness.

But life follows art. For his exuberantly frivolous violence, for his revelation of his own primal and irresponsible delights, Spielberg was treated as if he’d made a monster movie in which he is the monster. For many viewers, he was an unsympathetic and unlovable one, and he received a critical lambasting that risked, if not his exile from Hollywood, at least his banishment from the community of Hollywood auteurs. His respectability was in danger, so he took refuge in his cinematic superego, in movies of high purpose and fine feelings, and never again filmed as freely. He managed to avoid exile, but the cost was exile from himself. ♦