Word: spielberg
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Directed by Steven Spielberg; Written by Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale...
...biggest problem with Steven Spielberg's 1941 is its budget: this film is the most expensive Hollywood farce ever made. Certainly money has its uses in movies, but in a comedy? A key element of humor is surprise; jokes are funniest when they sneak up on the audience out of nowhere. In big-budget film making, the opportunities for comic am bush quickly disappear. Every joke announces itself in deafening stereo sound. Every pratfall is as momentous as Cecil B. DeMille's parting of the, Red Sea. Punch lines cannot be thrown away, but are instead hurled like...
While it was generous of Spielberg to employ so large a percentage of the Screen Actors Guild, the huge cast almost immobilizes the movie. It takes too long to establish who everyone is and to knit all the plot strands together. Even though the film is relentlessly busy - there seems to be a physical gag in every shot - it has little of the director's usual narrative drive. The movie's story does not so much move forward as gradually selfdestruct. At times 1941 drags to a com- plete and stultifying halt: a lengthy dancehall brawl, conceived along...
...Since Spielberg gives each actor the same small amount of screen time, the audience has no one to root for, and the stars have few chances to make a strong impression. Often the frothiest bits, such as the doubleentendre courtship of a secretary (Nancy Allen) and a young soldier (Tim Matheson), are suffocated by John Williams' excessive musical score. Only Belushi upstages the chaos around him, and even his repertoire of eating and belching jokes seems strained when separated from the scruffy, modest context of Animal House...
After sneak showings of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg cut only the background song, When You Wish Upon a Star, from the final spacecraft scene, but that small snip changed the mood of the story. "I felt the song was going to be perceived as wistful thinking," says the director today. "The audience perceived the film as a current event." Spielberg may return the song to the soundtrack in what must surely be the most extraordinary case of film tinkering ever: he is readying a revised version of Close Encounters, one of the top ten grossers...