1941 – More Dangling Threads

An underappreciated classic. Essay. 500 words, 3-minute read.

By Ray Tabler

Recently, a friend (Dharma Windham) posted about re-watching a movie, Stephen Spielberg’s 1941, a 1979 screwball historical comedy. The film is set in Los Angeles, weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack, not an obvious choice for a comedy. It relates the Battle of Los Angeles, which didn’t actually happen. But people sure thought it was a thing at the time.

In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, many people expected a Japanese invasion of the US west coast. That rumor was enough to ignite a spectacular fusillade of trigger-happy antiaircraft gunnery on February 25, 1942. The inciting incident was a lone Japanese submarine which had surfaced the night before and lobbed some shells at oil storage tanks on the California coast. The damage was minimal, but the story grew in the telling. Soon an imminent invasion fixated everyone in the Los Angeles metro area. That resulted in a panicky bombardment of imagined enemy planes over the skies of Hollywood.

Spielberg saw a comedic opportunity in this paranoid situation, and crafted a movie which is funnier now than it was almost 50 years ago. (Spielberg shifted the timing to a couple of months earlier in order to take advantage of the visual impact of Christmas decorations in the background of shots.) The nominal main characters are a pair of star-crossed lovers, who battle confusion and a jealous interloper during the long night of chaos. What draws my attention is the absolute gold mine of fascinating minor characters in the ensemble cast.

John Belushi plays a berserk fighter pilot, Wild Bill Kelso, who’s determined to get at the enemy, no matter who happens to be in the way. Dan Akroyd is a tank commander, blasting away into the empty night sky over Hollywood. “You know, this year wasn’t the big year of the war, ’41. I think the really big year is going to be 1942.”

Warren Oates is an unhinged, officer guarding an ammo dump out in the desert, convinced that the Japanese have a secret airbase at Pomona. “Let me hear your guns!” He screams when Wild Bill lands for directions in a mist-shrouded, apocalyptic scene.

Toshiro Mifune plays the captain of the bombarding Japanese submarine, who rightly judges the whole mission as ill-advised.

Nancy Allen and Tim Matheson are a couple of trysting lovers, who precipitate the battle with an unauthorized, lust-fueled airplane ride over downtown at the peak of the war nerves Spielberg has carefully built up through the story.

1941 is a wild ride, starting off slow but growing faster and more crazy like a runaway beer truck, rolling down a steep hill. There are a wealth of other dangling threads I didn’t have room for here; Ned Beatty and the antiaircraft gun, the flying elephant, the ventriloquist on the Ferris wheel, the zootsuiters, Christopher Lee as a German liaison officer, and Slim Pickens the constipated cowboy.

1941 was not a great box office success. People didn’t quite know how to take it in 1979, myself included. Time has highlighted the subtle satire hiding beneath the slapstick surface, though.

Now, I don’t want to let any spoilers slip. But Wild Bill Kelso does eventually get his wish to close with the enemy.