Master director Steven Spielberg looks back with mixed feelings on a now almost forgotten war movie comedy. In 1979, it caused a real shock among his fans.
Steven Spielberg never makes mistakes. At least that’s the opinion of many fans of the director, who has written himself into film history like no other with masterpieces such as Jaws and E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial. However, he himself regrets some of his own works. These include the war film comedy 1941 – Where to Hollywood?, which met with disastrous initial reactions at the time.
Steven Spielberg’s war film comedy 1941 is considered one of his worst films
1941 is set in California, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. A submarine with Japanese and German soldiers (including Toshirô Mifune and Christopher Lee) wants to destroy Hollywood, but cannot find it. Meanwhile, the US defenders led by Sergeant Frank Tree (Dan Aykroyd) and Captain Kelso (John Belushi) leave a trail of devastation out of sheer paranoia.
Watch the English trailer for 1941 here:
The film received mediocre to poor reviews when it was released in 1979, which praised the visual effects and soundtrack but often criticized the clumsy dramaturgy (via Metacritic ). Empire still considers 1941 to be Spielberg’s worst film. According to Variety, the director himself also admits to making serious mistakes when shooting the war comedy:
[The studio] granted me an unlimited budget for 1941, and then it took 178 days to shoot because I directed even the most minimal details. That was the worst mistake you could have made. Nevertheless, I had a great time on set. […] But when I showed the film in a movie theater for the first time, you could have made a
pin could have dropped. [It was] the first comedy in history that didn’t make anyone laugh.
The biting reaction of the audience still haunted the director many years later. “It was as if I had committed a war crime,” Far Out Magazine quotes the filmmaker from the Spielberg documentary.
However, as The Numbers figures suggest, 1941 was not a financial flop. And Spielberg’s remorse about his mistakes during filming may well be limited: After all, he followed up the comedy with titanic masterpieces such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Schindler’s List and Saving Private James Ryan.
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