It is said that Kubrick once told Spielberg that the mistake with 1941 was that it was marketed as a comedy and should have been marketed as a drama. I think Kubrick may have been yanking Spielberg’s chain, but I can see where he’s coming from. There is a dark underbelly to 1941, one that hasn’t really come to light until the age of the DVD, and which is still hard to identify with untrained eyes.

When I got my “collector’s edition” of 1941 a couple of years ago, the first thing I noticed is that it’s a terrible transfer of a terrible print. The second thing I noticed was that it was twenty-odd minutes longer. So the folks at Universal are saying, essentially, “You know that movie everyone hates? Well now it looks awful and is longer than you remember! The quality of the transfer is still a mystery to me, but it turns out that the longer cut is Spielberg’s. On my first viewing, the “restored” scenes felt superfluous at best and clunky at worst — they threw off the rhythms of a movie that had always had problems but which had always at least moved at a decent clip.

On a second viewing, the DVD still looks abysmal but the restored scenes revealed a darker, more cynical, subversive aspect to the movie.

1941‘s theme is “wartime madness.” Characters in the movie use the threat of invasion as an excuse for all kinds of socially inappropriate behavior, ranging from petty theft to attempted murder. Sex is uppermost on the minds of many folks, but for others the plot machinations of 1941 are an excuse to give vent to unchecked prejudices. Since everyone likes sex, let’s discuss that first.

SEX. As everyone knows, the movie begins with Cmdr Mitamura’s submarine “skewering” (Spielberg’s word) a skinny-dipper off the coast of Northern California. It then moves on to Donna Stratton’s airplane fetish and Maxine’s soldier fetish, not to mention Capt Kelso’s free-floating infantilism. In the “restored” cut, there is a darker version of this. The female dancers at the USO club are coached by their leader Miss Fitzroy that their job is to “entertain” soldiers and sailors before they go off to war. Nothing is left to the imagination as to what “entertaining” constitutes — Miss Fitzroy is, essentially, a madam for the US government, telling the women of the country that it is their patriotic duty to submit to the desires of horny soldiers. Many of the young ladies at the USO eagerly agree with this advice — they’re as crazy about soldiers as Donna Stratton is about planes. “Good girl” Betty Douglas feels less certain — she’s kind of sweet on non-soldier Wally, and has come to the aggressive attention of meathead antagonist Chuck Sitarsky (who in turn is the object of Maxine’s unwanted desires). Before leaving for the big dance, Betty’s father Ward takes her aside for what we suspect is going to be a “be careful” lecture. But no! Betty’s father gives her the exact same orders as Miss Fitzroy. As Ward is too old to fight in the war and his sons are too young, he feels that whoring his daughter out to departing soldiers is the best he can do to contribute to the war effort. (Ward, of course, later gets to contribute to the war by shooting off a big gun, destroying his home in the process. Wartime fetishes, apparently, will destroy the American home — not to mention significant portions of Hollywood.)

Now then:

RACE. There is a scene somewhere in Act II of the restored cut of 1941 where Pvt Jones, a black soldier, reports for duty in Sgt Tree’s tank crew. The otherwise-white crew members humiliate Jones, and one, Pvt Foley, goes so far as to paint his face white. It’s an ugly scene, not at all funny, and it throws the movie deeply out of whack. But on a second viewing I found it to be the tip of an iceberg of racial undertones that make up an entire missing “shadow movie” that moves underneath the text of 1941 like Mitamura’s submarine runs underneath the waters of the Califorfornia coast.

We could start with the cast’s general animus toward the “Japs,” but that aspect is fairly well known, and we know that the filmmakers don’t hate the Japanese because Mitamura is the most dignified and honorable character in the movie. Let’s start instead with Wally, one of the major protagonists (and the sole protagonist of the original script). Wally Stephens is played by Bobby DiCicco, and, despite his dark hair and eyes, exudes about as much “ethnicity” as Barry Williams. Wally is criticized by Sgt Tree and his crew for his taste in clothes several times during the movie, once for his garish Hawaiian shirt commemorating Pearl Harbor (which makes no sense to me) and again for his sleek black-and-red zoot suit. In the theatrical cut, Wally’s zoot suit has no racial importance, but in the restored cut we see Wally hanging out with his Mexican friends before entering the big dance. And of course, any student of Los Angeles history knows that the zoot suit was the trademark of the Mexican hipster in LA, and one of the underdeveloped plot strands of 1941 is the zoot-suit riots of the 1940s, where servicemen battled Mexicans (apparently prodded by a bloodthirsty media — the “riots” were announced, and promoted, in advance by racist radio commentators). So Wally, it seems, if not Mexican himself, is “identified” as such by the racial indicators of the script.

Then there is Capt von Kleinschmidt, the Nazi tagging along with Mitamura, who keeps his Nazism in check for most of the movie, but ultimately informs Mitamura that he and his yellow-skinned countrymen have no place in Hitler’s thousand-year Reich. Von Kleinschmidt is immediately thrown overboard for his bigotry, but many other characters are not punished so greatly.

General Stillwell is accorded great dignity and gravitas by the filmmakers, and gets big laughs when we see him tearing up at Dumbo. In the theatrical cut, we see Stillwell laughing along with the crows as they taunt Dumbo, but in the restored version the scene goes on much longer and includes almost the entire “elephant fly” song. Stillwell knows the song by heart and recites it along with the movie characters, and when it’s over he applauds and invites the officers around him to join in. At first this scene felt like padding, but then I remembered that the crows in Dumbo are minstrel characters. It’s one thing to show Stillwell chuckling along with a racist cartoon, but to show him reciting the lyrics by heart and then applauding implies that, beneath his calm, sane exterior, Stillwell is as racist as Pvt Foley — he just doesn’t know it.

Where are the Jews in this World War II movie from the future director of Schindler’s List? I can identify two. First is USO bandleader Raoul, who, apropos of nothing, reveals his last name to be Lipschitz, which makes him a typical Hollywood Jew, changing his name to something dark and glamorous to make it in show business. Then there is the infamous gnat Herbie Kazlminsky, who, in addition to being a stereotypical Jew, is a dead ringer for the director. To drive the point home, Spielberg gives Herbie a ventriloquist dummy who looks even more like Spielberg than Herbie does.

(Wait — there is a third, Hollywood Bigshot Meyer Mishkin, who is the judge at the dance contest. His character is also a Hollywood Jew, but one from the other side of the table — a shot-caller, not a performer. They didn’t need to change their names — they didn’t need to be loved by the public.)

(It’s odd that in a movie filled with so much racism, no Polish jokes are lobbed at Sitarksky, and the presence of an Italian neighborhood-watch captain, complete with old-world Italian harridan wife, goes unremarked.)

The setup scene between Pvts Foley and Jones is missing from the theatrical cut, but its answer scene remains: in Act IV, a bag of flour or something explodes in Pvt Jones’s face, rendering him white. Foley laughs heartily at this and is answered with an explosion of soot in his own face. When Jones laughs back at Foley, he screams in horror at the notion of appearing to be black.

All these scenes imply that 1941 had, at some point in its development. a much darker, more satirical, more subversive purpose, to suggest that America is an inherently racist, sexually perverse country and that wartime is welcomed by Americans as an excuse to vent that racism and perversion. That message is certainly as true today as it was in 1979, but it explains why John Wayne and Charlton Heston both recoiled in horror when Spielberg asked them to play Stillwell.

There is a moment in the “making-of” documentary where Spielberg recalls Wayne’s reaction, saying that he felt the script was “a slap in the face” of America and the memory of World War II. Spielberg then amends the comment by saying that 1941 is a pie in the face of America and the memory of World War II. Between those two “face” comments, I think, is where 1941 went wrong. Spielberg was given a script with some relatively serious questions to ask about America’s national character and responded by making a movie that is primarily about stuff blowing up. Spielberg mentions that when he got the script he skipped straight to the end because he wanted to read the scene where the Japanese submarine blows up the Ferris Wheel on the Santa Monica Pier, loved it, and wanted the rest of the movie to be just like that.

That is, indeed, the net result. The nice thing is that, as spectacle, 1941 works pretty well, and once the big USO dance-contest set piece kicks in, the movie hits a groove, mows down its lapses in narrative logic, and gets by on sheer kineticism for the rest of its considerable running time. The action sequences, always and forever a Spielberg forte, sizzle and pop as they should, and the craziness reaches an appropriate fever pitch in the final reels. But I for one will from now on watch 1941 and wonder about the other movie that’s hiding in there somewhere among the hijinks.