1941

You invite Steven Spielberg over for an entertaining get-together. A young version of him shows up, drunk and draped in an American flag. After jumping on your coffee table he starts telling a story at an uncomfortable high volume, gesticulating wildly and being allround obnoxious. In-between he ogles your girlfriend creepily and makes racist jokes. Towards the end he just starts trashing your house, cackling like a madman non-stop. You are relieved when he finally leaves. 1941.

Has the same laugh per minute ratio of Schindler's List.

As an insecure boy I remember '1941' having a profound effect on me. I watched it several times in disbelief. This was Spielberg?! But.. But it was.. horrible! I felt shame. There was something wrong with me. Spielberg could do no wrong! Fast forward to the bitter, misanthropic man I was, when I recently watched 'War Horse'... If only someone could have reached out to that little boy: 'Hey... Hey guy... it's okay... come here... 'berg fucked up.' Sorry, I'm going to go have a moment with myself.

An absolute mess of a movie, to say nothing of how abrasively unfunny it is. It's about as funny as Pearl Harbor. The final scene with the house is Exhibit A in Spielberg's inability to frame a gag. The bombastic action is actually somewhat fun, though, and the score is quite good as well. It's a great shame, too, because there's a great movie buried in this concept, but it was made by a filmmaker then too young to nail it and now probably too pedestrian to even try.

By starting with a Jaws parody, 1941 taps the core of Spielberg cinema -- the belief in the power of spectacle -- and the unofficial American written by Gale/Zemeckis to unleash hell. The Japanese never really hit LA -- they tear apart an amusement park and leave --, but all that matters here is the collection of stupid action/explosion set-pieces and shouting comic bits (the couple getting laid in a plane, the military officer crying at a Dumbo screening, the street riot, the mental Aykroyd).

By satirizing the childlike view of the war, this is an attempted Boomer take on Dr. Strangelove. But while Kubrick got how to evenhandedly mock insanity, this film punches down too often via insensitive race and gender jokes. The script & editing are bad, as entire plotlines disappear without reason. The cinematic comedy is helped a little by Spielberg's visual style (especially in movement and framing). But even if you're a fan of his, that's not enough for a recommendation.

Despite its luxurious length, it never quite goes anywhere. It's a half-neat idea, wartime spectacle comedy made by a modern post-auteur theory director (I may not know what that means). Except spectacle films kind of sucked, and no one but the most unimaginative classicist should want to make one. It's awful enough, but visually it's not so bad. I mean, it's bad when you think of the cost, but not so bad you care.

A guilty pleasure, this one's neither particularly funny or thrilling. Just loud, fast and hyper. Kind of like eating cotton candy and washing it down with Mountain Dew.

There is famous actors doing slapstick, very expensive explosions and things being destroyed left, right and centre, but very few laughs. All sound and fury, signifying nothing...although seeing Toshirô Mifune and Christopher Lee continually bickering in a submarine was worth an extra point.

A cult classic.

Toshiro Mifune and Christopher Lee sharing a scene? 20 POINTS! SLIM PICKENS?! 20 POINTS! John Bellushi and Dan Aykroyd dont get any points cause they are playing textbook crazy characters.

Just another mash. Films/shows that poke fun at war... just don't belong in existence.

Spielberg's first real mistake. That being said. This is an exceedingly well shot and occasionally very funny mistake. 1941 works well enough. It simply overstays it's welcome by a solid 20 minutes and there are far too many characters.

My lord what were they on? SNL?

Some comedies are based on a script full of funny dialogue. Not this one. It's all physical situations that need to be executed with the right precision to be funny. This film is all excess. Stuff just goes on and on and on never really generating any laughs and becoming an expensive ordeal stuffed full of paper thin characters. Everyone's just an idiot with almost no definable character traits.

:(

A benchmark for cinematic self-indulgence with about as much subtlety as Jack the Ripper's last kill - 80s excess had nothing on this 1979 flick. It's the comedy equivalent of watching Macho Man Randy Savage flex for 2 hours uninterrupted - ooh yeah! It's also an unexpected Christmas film. I felt violated while watching this, but it's art so I guess that makes it interesting.

Just didn't work and wasn't funny.

The racial stuff and attempted rape is, uh, a little uncomfortable.

totally crazy, some great jokes to make you LOL

I MUST give it an 80/100. I am compelled to do it by forces that are outside my control. I love Spielberg, and you can tell how much fun he had here. And I like seeing several actors from Jaws in here. Hi, Lorraine Gary and Murray Hamilton. But, otherwise, it's... it's pretty blah. Drags all over the place, and... as a movie, it kind of doesn't make any sense.

I mostly watched this movie because of some of the actors + as a Spielberg curiosity. It really doesn't carry well to this day with some of the cheap jokes it has and it is overly zany and wacky all the time. Regardless, it did get a few laughs from me plus I really enjoyed seeing some of the actors in their roles. It's really way too long and a bit too crazy for its own good. At some point I was just hoping for it to end because you can only stomach so much wacky comedy at a time.

1941 is never as good as you remember, but never as bad as it could be. It's odd to see Steve Speilberg directing a comedy with an All-Star cast, but you laugh and laugh throughout this movie.

It's damn fractured, but very funny. Maybe a recent rewatch would tell me otherwise, but I had fond memories of it.

My name is Wild Bill Kelso and don't you forget it! Excellent character in a very good movie!

Chaotic and hilarious.

Silly fun.

Ultimately pointless. One problem with farce, I guess: hard to stick to the story when you're being wacky every which way. Wild Bill was just annoying (sort of like the winner of a Bad Belushi contest). Dianne Kay was certainly lovely, but...the whole thing was way too long. Not quite the bomb that its reputation would suggest (except financially, of course); I think it was a victim of the pressure of being Spielberg. Anyway, I did like the rolling ferris wheel--and the collapsing house.

watchable

WORST ... SPIELBERG MOVIE ... EVER.

There's a bunch of good bits, but they just don't quite mix.

52.000

Weirdly flat direction made this difficult to stick with so I gave up after 10 mins. 10 whole minutes I wasted on this

a defining moment in the history of "what the hell is going on"

Spielberg is awful at comedy.

51.500

What was the budget on this? So much destruction!!! Take that CGI...can't beat the real stuff.

I went to school with kids like '1941'. Noisy, annoying and too much energy...

Famously and rightfully known as a failure, but it's a bizarre and ambitious enough one that I'd recommend giving it a watch for sheer novelty value, particularly if you're a Spielberg fan. This is a WEIRD movie and I've seen no others quite like it. I also had no idea Christopher Lee and Toshiro Mifune were in this until I watched it, which was a nice surprise. Shame one of Mifune's only (or is it his only?) western movies couldn't be, well, better.

Ultimately fails as a comedy and a war film. I still own it so occasionally I can pop it in and wonder what exactly was going on.

Pretty humorous, but at 2 1/2 hours it's overly long for a comedy. The ensemble cast is so large that it's sometimes hard to keep track of the subplots. Probably my favorite scenes involve Slim Pickens being interrogated by Japanese submariners, and I was disappointed when he suddenly disappeared halfway through the movie. After the first hour or so the film starts to overstay its welcome, morphing from a satirical spoof comedy to a semi-serious war movie with occasional slapstick thrown in.

Not funny.

Hmm

Bizarre movie; almost didn't believe it was by Spielberg until the ending credits hit. On that note, seeing Mifune's name on there shocked the hell outta me. Cool. Doesn't have a ton of laughs, but it's weird enough to be worth a watch.