1941 (film)
1941 is a movie directed by
Steven Spielberg and starred
John Belushi and
Dan Aykroyd. A comedy about the panic that occurs after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the film is generally considered to be Spielberg's first major box office flop.
The story takes place days after the
attack on Pearl Harbor, with panic and chaos among the citizens of
Los Angeles. The story is told through connecting vignettes. At the center of the story is a crusty general (
Robert Stack) who tries to bring order among the people whose lives are intertwined with others. It is notable as one of the few American films featuring
Toshiro Mifune, a popular Japanese actor. The Plot is based on two actual incidents that occurred during World War Two. The first is the
West coast air raid. The second was the shelling of a West coast oil refinery by a Japanese Submarine. Both incidents occurred in 1942.
The
film, mainly a production of
Columbia Pictures (with some help from
Universal Studios), was a moderate
box office success, but not the
blockbuster film the producers were hoping for. Because the film failed to match the box office numbers of Spielberg's previous films,
Jaws and
Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
1941 was considered a flop by comparison and a stain on Spielberg's reputation.
It did not help that some mainstream publications pre-labeled it as "Spielberg's Christmas Turkey". The film was a major critical failure, slammed for being excessive and ham-handed.
1941, along with
Francis Ford Coppola's
Apocalypse Now,
Martin Scorsese's
New York, New York, and
Robert Altman's
Popeye, became major examples of excessive directorial control over a film and marked the beginning of the end of the
New Hollywood era which closed with the historic failure of
Michael Cimino's
Heaven's Gate. While
Apocalypse Now achieved critical acclaim and reasonable box-office success, the other films are regarded as each of the respective director's failures.
Spielberg humorously joked at one point that he considered converting 1941 into a
musical halfway into production and mused that "in retrospect, that might have helped."
However, Bob Gale notes in a DVD documentary about the film: "It is down in the history books as a big flop, but it wasn't a flop. The movie didn't make the kind of money that Steven's other movies, Steven's most successful movies have made, obviously. But the movie was by no means a flop. And both Universal and Columbia have come out of it just fine."
Because both Columbia Pictures and Universal Studios had major involvement with the production of the film, Spielberg was unhappy with the final theatrical cut of
1941 which was heavily influenced by the involvement of both studios. After the success of his directors cut of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", Spielberg was given permission to create his own "extended cut" of
1941 for
network television. It was only after this "extended cut" was aired on
ABC that the film finally found a widespread audience and today is considered a cult classic, if not a camp classic. The "extended cut" has also been released on DVD.
When Stephen Spielberg appeared on the documentary 'Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures'
Stanley Kubrick suggested to Spielberg he should have marketed ‘1941' as a drama rather than a comedy
