A Sleeper You Oughta See!

We all have a list of movies in our head that we thought should have been received better than they were. "1941" is close to the top of my list. I have never understood why Steven Spielberg didn't score big with it, but I have watched it many times and enjoyed each and every viewing.

The scene is post-Pearl Harbor Los Angeles, where paranoia reigns and where offshore a Japanese submarine is attempting to locate Hollywood so it can surface, shell the city, and inflict a devastating blow to American morale. (This perhaps says a little something about how Spielberg thinks Hollywood regards itself in the greater scheme of things...and who can argue with him?) The sub commander's problem: his navigation equipment is on the blink, and he is hard pressed to locate North America, let alone Hollywood. Salvation appears in the form of Slim Pickens, the eternal country bumpkin who is shanghai'ed onto the sub and subsequently swallows a Cracker Jacks toy compass that could lead them to glory, leading to further hilarious attempts to reclaim the compass. Without divulging whether their mission is accomplished, let's just say if the commander had directed the attack on Pearl Harbor, it would be a minor historical footnote.

Dan Aykroyd leads a group of servicemen intent on parking an anti-aircraft gun on Ned Beatty's oceanside lot, to Ned's bumbling and amusing consternation. John Belushi stars as a fighter pilot prone to navigating using a huge map which totally obscures his vision. His best scene: he runs low on gas, lands on a highway, pulls up to the pumps at a gas station, starts pumping gas into the idling plane, goes into the station for a drink, and comes outside to discover that the engine's vibration has advanced the throttle enough to start the plane rolling down the road, with Belushi in hot pursuit on foot. Tim Matheson plays (natch) a lecherous young troop with an eye for Nancy Allen, who has this thing about doing it in airplanes. There are a lot of other terrific cameos as well.

I really like this movie. It is an offbeat treatment of that era, a time when there wasn't a lot of laugh about, and yet it rings true in a lot of ways. There is a generous amount of spoofing of military ways in general, foreign and domestic, which I find frighteningly true to life. If you haven't seen "1941", give it a whirl.