The cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light

1941: war on Hollywood

Reception

Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, while both exemplify the modern blockbuster, demonstrated very different marketing. In contrast to high-profile merchandising strategies of Jaws, the release that established the pattern for New Hollywood, Close Encounters’ narrative image, in accordance with its plot, withheld information. In what Columbia announced as its ‘most ambitious advertising campaign’ ever, 27 newspapers across the US featured two-page ‘introductory’ notices six months before a staggered release. The campaign mounted slowly and press releases stressed secrecy shrouding the production. Newspapers carried daily countdown advertisements before each opening, while theatres showed ‘a long, sophisticated and wholly unrevealing trailer’ (Pym 1978: 99). Restricted release calculatedly gambled on reports from other cities; curiosity stimulated by such publicity, together with the enigmatic title, created widespread desire to experience the phenomenon.

As Close Encounters proceeded to match Jaws, Spielberg’s success became commonly attributed to hype. However, promotion and publicity alone cannot explain why certain films succeed over others. Indeed, American audiences rejected 1941 ‘despite saturation ads’ (Pirie 1981: 60) and Spielberg’s increasing fame. In fact, it would never have existed if Spielberg’s involvement had not seduced Universal and Columbia into believing the package almost failsafe. Even so, neither had confidence to finance it solely.

Critics also widely – although not universally – reviled 1941, for failure as comedy and for the failure’s epic scale. This represents the turning point in Spielberg’s reputation, for it was as a Spielberg movie they judged it. Authorship’s centrality in contemporary film culture becomes apparent. Without Spielberg, 1941, if financed at all, would not have commanded such a budget. Yet without Spielberg it would not have caused such disappointment or rancour. For some it provided opportunities to castigate Spielberg’s previous success, identified with escalated budgets and extended schedules. Such criticism may have affected subsequent determination to limit spending on Raiders of the Lost Ark – the movie that consolidated his image as an ‘escapist’, ‘children’s’ filmmaker but also, within the industry, restored his reputation for economy and efficiency.

Some critics read 1941’s black farce as satirising Hollywood itself, ‘American militarism, in a similar vein to the helicopter attack scene in Apocalypse Now [1979]’ (also scripted by John Milius), and the idealised American family, whose perfect house is systematically wrecked before sliding over a cliff when Pa hammers a Christmas wreath to the door (Buscombe 1980). That climax surely bears comparison with the cliff-house explosion in Antonioni’s calculatedly countercultural Zabriskie Point (1970). 1941’s reception, however, involved another dimension. The $26.5 million budget, then ‘astronomically high’ (McGillivray in Pirie 1981: 313), attracted widespread condemnation for expenditure on sets wasted in an orgy of on-screen destruction. This response, Ed Buscombe argues, was irrational. Notwithstanding how rarely movie sets become old people’s homes after use, applying puritanical morality to one product’s costs as opposed to the entire system makes little sense in a capitalist industry: ‘The budget, after all, is dictated by what the people making the film think they need to invest in order to maximise their return. If they spend too much, that’s a bad commercial decision, not a sin.’ (1980)

In this respect, 1941 emblematised an industry seen as floundering. On one hand, the imperative to appeal to a US movie-going population of whom 49 per cent were aged 12 to 20 (Laskos in Pirie 1981:14) was interpreted as dumbing-down, and betrayal of the auteur principle New Hollywood appeared to valorise. In fact crass commercialism was as much a response to as the cause of declining older audiences. Conversely, that same auteur approach encouraged indulgent filmmaking beset by problems of nightmarish proportions, such as Apocalypse Now (budget: $12 million, final cost: $31 million) and the film that bankrupted United Artists, Heaven’s Gate (1980; $7.5 million to $36 million). Meanwhile, Kramer versus Kramer became 1979’s surprise hit: an unassuming project with little predictable appeal to the core audience, a reminder that nothing in the industry was certain. Given that directors’ average age was the lowest in fifty years (Thomson in Pirie 1981: 125), no doubt resentment of Spielberg’s ‘Movie Brat’ ascendancy tempered responses. He was ripe for comeuppance.

Spielberg mounted an offensive, assuring Saturday Review that 1941 would nudge into the black following television, video, cable and reissue agreements: ‘Still, the critics bury their heads in the sand and say, “How could this film do $50–$60 million when I gave it the worst review I’ve ever written?” Believe me, Hollywood is not being crippled by $30 million movies.’ Spielberg, in the same interview, insisted proven filmmakers ‘earned the right to spend someone else’s money’ if they intended to make money (June 1981; quoted in John Baxter 1996: 198). Fourteen years later, he argued on TV that ‘What did it cost?’ is irrelevant. ‘Is it worth seven dollars [admission price]?’ is what matters (Baxter 1996: 198).

In one sense, coming at Buscombe’s answer from a different direction, Spielberg was right. 1941, which earned respectable revenues in Europe and Japan, failed only comparatively, judged against Spielberg’s previous hits. Furthermore, as Buscombe opined, ‘maybe critics are entitled to say that if it isn’t as funny as Jaws was thrilling, then it’s a flop’ (Buscombe 1980). Spielberg’s proclamation was, nevertheless, slightly disingenuous. One reason 1941 commanded its budget and mustered such an array of stars was the practice of auctioning anticipated blockbusters, requiring exhibitors to ‘blind bid’ before production finishes. In addition, exhibitors often have to guarantee minimum runs or advances against expected rentals. For screening the film, successful bidders keep only ten per cent of gross takings (after a negotiated allowance for expenses), this portion increasing during the run. However, agreements limit this ‘fixed minimum floor’ such that exhibitors may eventually cover losses on a flop they had no opportunity to preview (Franklin in Pirie 1981: 95). Thus 1941’s American box office disappointment did not cost its makers, who broke even, as exhibitors honoured their contracts. No one’s heart should bleed for the exhibitors. Large chains seek to monopolise hits. They, rather than independent theatres, wager for successful bids. Yet the affront to powerful leisure organisations of forcibly subsidising profligacy hardly enhanced Spielberg’s trade reputation.

A difficulty in discussing 1941 is that common sense dictates examining it as comedy. Yet humour is highly subjective. Screenwriting tutor Robert McKee argues: ‘Comedy is pure: if the audience laughs, it works; if it doesn’t laugh, it doesn’t work. End of discussion. That’s why critics hate comedy; there’s nothing to say’ (1998: 359). While sophisticated theories describe comedy both formally and functionally, applying these to an experience widely considered unsatisfactory on both counts seems futile. Analysis does not necessarily kill its object stone dead (that presumption would deny serious consideration of popular culture). However, without specific reasons, it would be perverse to dissect something that never worked in the first place.

Nevertheless, 1941 requires consideration for the sake of completeness – not least as a resumé of Spielberg’s previous output and dress rehearsal for much to come. I shall subordinate conclusive evaluation in exploring two aspects, intertextuality and carnivalesque, as illustrations of approaches that illuminate his other work.

Failed comedy

One problem with 1941 is that Universal’s backing intended to continue a string of teenage successes. These included Animal House and features involving comedians Cheech and Chong, Steve Martin and the Saturday Night Live (1975–date) cast, several of whom – notably Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi and Tim Matheson – starred in Spielberg’s film. However, that humour, both anarchic and childish, embodied an anti-authoritarian and hedonistic mood fuelled by post-1960s drug culture and rising disillusionment following Vietnam and Watergate. What possible attraction was there for youngsters in satirising events from 1941?

Satire exposes and mocks folly from a superior position. 1941 certainly ridicules mindless acceptance of authority. Aykroyd’s tank commander, whose gung-ho speeches suggest brainwashing, is unstoppable when spouting operational drills and, after a head injury, turns into Hitchcock’s machine-like Memory Man from The 39 Steps (1935). Ned Beatty’s solid citizen destroys by stages the home that symbolises everything he considers his duty to defend. The tank crew demands leadership from a zoot-suiter they were brawling with earlier, simply because he has donned a military tunic. If, in reality, shock and paranoia followed Pearl Harbor, eliciting the events 1941 burlesques, that was because of the innocence of a culture that had never experienced defeat or had certainties challenged. For Spielberg, however, 1941 meant Dumbo, Helzapoppin’, Citizen Kane and the year Casablanca is set, while Fantasia and Pinocchio (both 1940) were still on release. It ended an era culminating with two movies by Victor Fleming, one of Spielberg’s most revered directors: Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz (1939). He viewed affectionately and nostalgically the era the script essentially derides.

That perhaps explains 1941’s unevenness. Sporadic hilarity intersperses with a different overall tone. In particular, Belushi’s Wild Bill Kelso is too big and gratuitously unmotivated for such close-up attention, especially against other players’ understated acting. These contrasts suggest an uncontrolled performance in an out-of-control movie in an uncontrollable industry. Belushi’s frat-house slobbishness and adolescent prurience, repeatedly fetishising women’s garter belts, detract from – and distance the movie from – the period lovingly recreated. The conception, craft and technology predicated on the budget – though Spielberg employed only effects available in 1941 – again overwhelm both the subject matter and any recreation of 1940s style. The script is highly variable, as are gags added during shooting. A brilliant aside, ‘We’ve got to figure out a way of making these things smaller’, subtitled as a Japanese submariner struggles to cram a cabinet radio through a hatch, is juxtaposed with the tired contrivance of naming a character Hollis Wood only because to Japanese sailors it will sound like ‘Hollywood’. The radio gag exploits disparity between the casual comment and the ruthless organisation by which Japanese businesses supposedly achieve dominance, and the absurdity of a multinational industry beginning on such an unlikely premise. The cliff house joke works similarly because the tiny act of nailing a wreath has disproportionate consequences; because Pa misses what everyone else, within and outside the diegesis, can clearly see; and because the causality both surprises – the house falls, not, as expected, the door – yet also corresponds, through its logical plausibility, to immutable physical laws. In other words, comedy requires shared understanding that it both challenges and confirms. Radical or conservative, it fosters audience unity. 1941 is indiscriminate and arbitrary, proffering no subject position for the spectator other than largely un-amused detachment.

Relentless pace – almost certainly exacerbated by drastic trimming after previews – obscures too much action, especially set-ups and slow burns of meticulously constructed gags appreciable only on repeat viewings the movie does not merit. Elaborate jokes – a tank charging through a paint factory, emerging rainbow-hued, before crashing into a turpentine factory and being restored to its former camouflage – are lost if the viewer blinks. Conversely, the principle that it is invariably funnier to ride through trashcans when it would be easier to ride around them demonstrates neither wit nor shared recognition.