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.

But before I get to that, a tangent. 1941 is currently available only on DVD in what Universal is calling a “collector’s edition,” meaning in this case, I think, that only “collectors” will be interested in seeing this DVD. I last watched it two years ago, and it was a headache-inducing nightmare. The transfer quality is abysmal, like the studio pointed a consumer-level video camera at a television playing a VHS copy of the movie. I had to check the box several times to see if perhaps I had gotten some kind of bogus bootleg copy of 1941, but no, this is a genuine studio release of an incredibly crappy DVD transfer. The other thing about the “collector’s edition” DVD is that the movie is about 20 minutes longer than it was in the theaters, and most the “restored footage” is quite bad — poorly timed scenes that lack focus and would normally be found in the “deleted scenes” file of a normal DVD. So my last experience watching 1941 was a crappy transfer of a flawed movie, now with extra bonus badness.

For this journal entry, I got out that abysmal DVD (there is no other version available) and watched the movie again. I did some research and found that this longer cut is, in fact, the cut Spielberg prefers, so I tried watching it again to see if perhaps, somehow, there was something I had missed in my prejudice against abysmal DVD transfers. I found, in fact, there was. The deleted scenes, while not making 1941 a “better” movie per se, point toward the movie 1941 was trying to be, a movie that seems to have gotten lost somewhere in the development process.

End of tangent.

Where are the flaws of 1941? How did it go wrong? Anyone familiar with this journal will be able to guess my answer — the director took his eye off the protagonist. Everything wrong with 1941 stems from a decision made, early on in the process, to stick a bunch of stuff in the narrative that has nothing to do with the protagonists’ pursuit of their goals.

Who is the protagonist of 1941? As it stands, there are several — three, by my count. The “restored” version indicates a stronger argument for a more classical single protagonist, and the “making of” documentary that fills out the DVD backs this up. The single protagonist of the original screenplay was Wally, the jitterbug-crazy kid who wants only to win a dance contest with his girlfriend and who winds up becoming a war hero. This is a perfectly decent character arc and would have formed the spine of a much better movie.

WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? As it stands, the movie has three protagonists I can identify. They are Wally, Lt. Birkhead and Cmdr Mitamura. Wally wants to win the jitterbug contest, Lt. Birkhead wants to bang this one girl, and Cmdr Mitamura wants to achieve “honor” by destroying Hollywood.

Now then: there are problems even here. Lt. Birkhead’s story conks out at the end of Act III, which makes him a minor protagonist at best, and we find, in Act IV, that Mitmura is, in fact, Wally’s antagonist, somethingthat neither character realizes until the beginning of Act IV. A protagonist who doesn’t even know he has an antagonist until Act IV is a very sad protagonist indeed, which is why I’m going to go ahead and call Mitamura a second protagonist. That, and there is a serious lack of antagonists in 1941. There is only Sitarsky, the meathead soldier who stands in Wally’s way of his goal, and Von Kleinschmidt, the Nazi who hangs out with Mitamura. Neither functions terribly well as an antagonist, which is another slight problem the movie has. 1941‘s lack of serious antagonists indicates a central problem of the movie — it has a generally sunny, light-hearted, forgiving, generous view of humanity, a stance in direct opposition to its screenplay.

Let’s go back to Wally for a moment. Wally has a girlfriend, Betty, whom he wants to take to a dance and win a jitterbug contest. Wally has a number of forces arrayed against him: he’s not a soldier (which makes him a second-class citizen), he wears a zoot suit (which casts him in an unfavorable light and means he can’t get in to the “soldiers only” dance hall, which has been converted into a USO), Betty’s father doesn’t approve of him, and there’s this guy Sitarsky who wants to muscle in on his action. Wally’s story arc goes like this: he steals a zoot suit from a department store by creating a fake air raid, he goes to Betty’s house to meet her and instead confronts Sitarsky, who beats him up and sends him packing. In Act II, Wally goes to the big dance contest, steals an army uniform to get in, finds Betty, and is confronted by Sitarsky again. A fight ensues, one that is interrupted by a real air raid. (It’s not a real air raid, but Wally doesn’t know that.) In Act III Wally, by dint of comic happenstance, bests Sitarsky, gets the girl and takes command of a tank. In Act IV Wally, now a tank commander and filled with patriotic fervor, drives his tank out to Santa Monica to do battle with Mitamura.

Here is Lt. Birkhead’s story: Lt. Birkhead is a young, randy general’s aide. He’s got his eye on Donna Stratton, a comely wench with a thing for airplanes. Birkhead knows that if he can get her up into an airplane, Donna can be his. In Act I, he tries to make it with Donna in a parked airplane and fails miserably. In Act II he journeys with Donna to Barstow, where a small airplane in the care of an insane army colonel is located. In Act III he gets Donna up in the air and, after some initial jitters, succeeds in getting a leg over with the comely wench. He is also, however, mistaken for a Japanese plane by the army, which sets off the air raid that disrupts Wally’s arc in Hollywood. In addition to being shot at by anti-aircraft guns in the streets of Hollywood, Birkhead is pursued by Capt. Wild Bill Kelso, a deranged, trigger-happy pilot, and is shot down into the La Brea Tar Pits. Birkhead’s story ends with the conclusion of Act III.

Here is Mitamura’s story: Mitamura is, for reasons unclear, commanding a submarine off the coast of California. He has taken it upon himself to destroy Hollywood. He has a number of forces arrayed against him: his ship is old and falling apart, his crew is incompetent and he’s got this Nazi on board who’s a pain in his ass. In Act I Mitamura, searching for Hollywood, first finds a skinnydipper, then a man named Hollis Wood, neither of whom helps him in the pursuit of his goal. In Act II he kind of isn’t in the movie much, in Act III he locates Santa Monica and settles on that as a substitute for Hollywood and does battle with Ward Douglas, Betty’s father, who happens to have an anti-aircraft gun stationed in his front yard. In Act IV Mitamura battles with Kelso, who comes at him after shooting down Birkhead, and Wally, who arrives with his newly acquired tank. Mitamura shoots down Kelso, blows up Wally’s tank and destroys the amusement park on the Santa Monica pier. He then tosses the Nazi overboard and sails back to Japan, contentthat he has achieved his goal of honor. As he leaves, he also acquires Kelso, who climbs into his submarine.

So far, so good. Three protagonists with neatly interlocking storylines and a coherent “vision” of wartime madness. Everyone in the movie operates under false pretenses, there is never any real threat from anywhere and the protagonists achieve their goals, if only in their own minds.

There are minor protagonists in the movie. There is Joan Douglass, Ward’s wife, whose goal is to keep order in her house. Not only is her goal uninteresting, her pursuit of it is passive and ineffective. She suffers, which is common enough in real life, but a weak arc for a comedy spectacle. There is General Stillwell, whose goal is to keep order in Los Angeles, which for him means going to see Dumbo in Hollywood. Stillwell is an interesting character but a passive, reactive protagonist. And there is Claude Crumm, whose goal is to watch out for submarines from the top of the Ferris Wheel in Santa Monica. He has been saddled with an antagonist in the form of Herbie Kazlminsky, an annoying, hyperactive teen and is, like the others, passive and reactive.

But wait, I hear you cry. Aren’t the stars of this movie John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd? That’s what the cover of the DVD says. Sadly, no. Belushi and Ackroyd play, respectively, Capt Kelso and Sgt Tree. Kelso is a minor antagonist in Lt. Birkhead’s storyline, and Sgt Tree is a minor plot-point in Wally’s storyline. Kelso is there to shoot down Birkhead and Tree is there to get knocked silly during the fake air raid, so that Wally can take command of the tank and become a war hero.

And there, dear readers, is the key to understanding what the primary problem is with 1941. Someone (all signs point to Spielberg) lost track of the protagonist of the movie (that is, Wally) and re-shaped the screenplay to devote significant screen-time to peripheral characters. Here’s what happens: the screenwriters have this minor character, Kelso, whose job it is to be a little trigger-happy and shoot down Lt. Birkhead over Hollywood. Spielberg casts John Belushi, the biggest comedy star on the planet at the time, in the role, and thus decides to expand the part into a major role. Problem is, there isn’t that much more that Kelso can contribute to the narrative. So we have, instead, in Acts I and II, numerous scenes of Kelso flying around, acting crazy and shooting at things, and in Act IV a totally superfluous attack on Mitamura’s submarine. Some of these scenes are indeed spectacular and some are even funny, but none of them contribute to the narrative and thus the audience finds them confusing and they contribute to the movie feeling overlong and unwieldy. Sgt Tree presents another problem which I will get to later.

Then there is the sad case of Hollis Wood. The role of Hollis Wood is, narratively speaking, a minor glitch in Mitamura’s pursuit of his goal. He sends his men ashore to find Hollywood, and they end up with Hollis Wood’s radio. That is all the character is required to do — to provide a radio for Mitamura. Spielberg cast beloved character actor Slim Pickens in the role and so the screenplay needed to be re-shaped to provide something for Hollis Wood to do — in this case, be kidnapped by Japanese soldiers dressed as Christmas trees, be interrogated by Mitamura, swallow a compass found in a box of Cracker Jack (“Popper Jacks” in the movie, for some reason) and be threatened with a prune-juice-informed bowel movement. None of this works for a number of different reasons and at the end of their encounter Hollis Wood gets away, Mitamura doesn’t get his compass (but does get his radio, which is all he needed) and Act I of 1941 is slowed down to a crawl.

(Having cast Pickens in the role, Spielberg could not resist inserting a reference to Dr. Strangelove, when Hollis Wood itemizes, Maj. Kong-style, the contents of his pockets. And for whatever reason, the joke had gone by me the previous 10 times or so I’ve seen this movie. When I did “get” it, it didn’t make the scene better for me — it made it worse. Because I suddenly realized that Spielberg had put Toshiro Mifune (who plays Mitamura), the quintessential Kurosawa star, and Slim Pickens, the icon of one of Kubrick’s greatest moments, in a scene together, put one of them in his underwear, and then had them discuss bowel movements. At one point in the scene, Mitamura turns to the camera and says, woefully, “This has not been honorable,” and all I could think was “I feel your pain, brother.”)

There is much more to say about this intriguing and complex misfire, but this will have to do for now. I will pick this up later, where I will discuss the missed opportunities of the movie and the “shadow movie” that exists beside the existing one.

He sees dozens of smaller UFOs whizzing about, all heading into a kind of enormous central pillar that’s closing. All the smaller UFOs we’ve seen so far get appearances as they enter this central hub, including the little red UFO that brought us so many laughs earlier in the movie. The central hub closes its hatches and then Roy is all alone at the base. The narrative impression is that the aliens are packing up to leave, and we are witnessing their final closing-up-of-shop. Then Roy, overcome with emotion, gets showered by some sort of magic glowing UFO pixie dust.

The movie then reverts back to its original ending, showing the lone alien traipsing down the landing ramp to say hello to Lacombe, an indelibly touching moment in the original, now reduced to an afterthought. The little last alien then traipses back up into the Mothership and it takes off.

Sitting in a theater watching this back in the day I remember thinking “There’s something wrong with this, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is.” It bothered me that we got to see the inside of the Mothership, partly because I thought that if one is making a truly religious movie (and Close Encounters is certainly that), one oversteps one’s bounds when one chooses to depict Heaven. No vision of the interior ofthe Mothership could possibly match the vision that any member of the audience has in his or her imagination. The new ending rankled, it smacked up hubris and spectacle, not faith.

Then, as I’m leaving the theater, I hear a young lady turn to her date and say “So they turned Roy into an alien? Huh.”

And I realize that not only is the “Special Edition” flawed, it’s a serious work of sabotage on a masterpiece. I go see it again and I realize that, objectively speaking, there is no other possible interpretation of the new ending. There’s Roy, there are are the aliens, nowhere near Roy, there are the aliens closing up shop, there’s Roy getting showered with magic UFO pixie dust, there’s an alien coming to say goodbye to Lacombe. Oh. My. God. The young lady with her date isn’t confused, she’s interpreted the ending the only possible way it can be interpreted. So not only is the Lone Alien’s hello-and-goodbye not the first face-to-face communication between an alien and a human, the Lone Alien isn’t even an alien, it’s ROY! And, by extension, the aliens in the movie must all be transformed humans as well! And the Mothership becomes nothing more than a gigantic human-into-alien transforming machine.

The “Special Edition,” quite apart from adding illumination to the original, completely ruins the original. And I spent the next couple of decades trying to figure out how a director as clever as Spielberg, someone with such a firm grasp of cinematic language, could make such an obvious blunder. When the 2002 “Final Edition” (or whatever they call it) DVD came out, I gave an elated sigh of relief to find that Spielberg had come to his senses and relegated the “Special Edition” ending to the dustbin of “Deleted Scenes.” In an accompanying interview, he mentions that the interior of the Mothership was a cinematic mistake, made because the studio pressured him into including it.

I note that the Gobi Desert scene is still in the “final cut,” which does not please me, partly because Lacombe is not in it, which makes it seem ersatz, and partly because the tone of the scene is off — it is jokey and antic while the other UN scenes are mysterious and a little scary — and partly because Laughlin’s beard doesn’t match his beard in the other scenes. I can let this scene go if Spielberg likes it, and the other little additions don’t offend, but oy that ending.

Now I find that they’ve released a three-disc “Ultimate Final Comprehensive Edition” that gathers together the three different cuts that have been issued over the years. Which I suppose is harmless, but as Sheryl Crow teaches us, the first cut is the deepest.