1941 was far ahead of its time in tone and content, they say. That’s a load of bull, says I, and when these guys are really being honest, they know it. "I didn’t really know what I was doing on this movie," Spielberg admits in a more revealing moment, and watching this disaster of a picture makes it abundantly clear. 1941 has individual bits of humor, of excitement, even of emotional honesty, but over the course of the nearly two and a half hours of its directors cut (the original theatrical version was thirty minutes shorter) nothing adds up to anything resembling a coherent whole.

Zemeckis and Gale’s script was originally a black comedy about Los Angeles paranoia in the days after Pearl Harbor entitled "The Night the Japs Attacked." Spielberg chose to go in a different direction, turning the project into a slapstick orgy of explosions and cartoon violence. Judging from the finished product, explosions were a big selling point in the cinema of the late 1970s. 1941 contains a couple dozen of them, and that doesn’t include the house that collapses, or the ferris wheel that rolls off its supports into the sea, or the plane that crashes, or the riot that breaks out on Hollywood Boulevard, or the other plane that crashes later. The trailers talked the movie up as "The most explosive comedy spectacular ever filmed!" This is an indisputable fact; 1941 contains more explosions than a accident in a fireworks factory. But it is telling that they choose to play up its combustibility, rather than, say, the quality of the humor.

Ironically, all the best stuff in the picture is quiet, character humor. The single funniest joke is so quiet it’s hard to notice (The Japanese Captain and his Nazi advisor talk so fluently to one another in their own language it’s several scenes before you realize they shouldn’t be able to understand each other). Slim Pickens plays Hollis P. Wood, a farmer who is captured by the Japanese and ordered to direct them to America. "Right here!" he responds when Toshiro Mifune as the sub captain asks "WHERE IS HOLLYWOOD?" Pickens’ tiny part was expanded after he was cast; this whole hilarious exchange wasn’t even included in the original script (a document whose most frequently uttered line is "AAAAAAAA!"). Interestingly, though the film contains more shrapnel than John Kerry’s rear, only a single character is killed, and he’s the evil Nazi. Apparently guns really don’t kill people and war is not hell, more of an annoyance along the line of a really bad traffic jam.

There are about two dozen important characters in 1941 and most of them are unappealing. ANIMAL HOUSE’s Tim Matheson plays an Army officer desperate to get laid, and Nancy Allen is the reporter with an airplane fetish he tries to con into the (or is that his?) cockpit. Their journey in an unidentified, radioless airplane is crucial to the plot but adds little in the way of comedy. Dan Aykroyd plays an Army mechanic, which provides the actor plenty of his favorite kind of material: lengthy monologues of procedural minutia (One imagines that Aykroyd is the kind of person who really enjoys reading the instructions to program a VCR). He and the rest of platoon (which also includes a wasted John Candy) get loads of scenes but, again, little in the way of legitimate humor or story relevance.

John Belushi - who would team with Aykroyd a year later in one of the greatest musical comedies ever, THE BLUES BROTHERS - plays Wild Bill Kelso, a crazed national guard pilot who chases phantom Japanese planes across the American West, screaming continuously throughout (Presumably the scene where Kelso’s superiors in Alabama wonder where he’s disappeared to was cut from the script). Let’s not even discuss the complete embarrassment that is the obscure twist of fate that provides ample screentime to a gun-toting nerd and his ventriloquist dummy. The only performers who rise above the queasy material are a delightful Robert Stack as General Stilwell, a real-life figure who provides the only voice of reason in this cinematic sea of insanity, and Bobby Di Cicco as a amoral kid trying to win back a girl he’s lost. His battle for her affections in a USA dance contest provide some much welcomed relief from people unnecessary blowing crap up.