1941

When I was a kid, I remember hearing about the movie 1941 and how it was supposedly an epic box office bomb. I had never seen it, so when it showed up in the PlutoTV rotation, I made a point of looking out for it to be able to watch it and make my own judgment as to how good the movie is or isn't.

As anyone who's watched enough World War II movies will know, Japan attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 (hence the title), sending the US into World War II. Nobody in the US knew what Japan was going to do next, and since in theory Japan could have continued heading east, which would have sent them to the US Pacific coast, there was the potential for a lot of worry in the US west. That fear of what might happened is portrayed when, six days after Pearl Harbor, a woman goes for a swim in the Pacific, only for a submarine to surface right under her!

That sub is indeed a Japanese sub, captained by Cmdr. Mitamura (Toshiro Mifune), who has a German liaison officer on board with him, Capt. von Kleinschmidt (Christopher Lee). Mitamura had not taken part in the raid on Pearl Harbor, and wanted to do his part for the Japanese war effort, which to him meant destroying something noteworthy in the US mainland. Fortunately, they've surfaced near Los Angeles, which is pretty noteworthy.

In the US, the country is quickly getting on a war footing. There are a lot of men in uniform, and nightclubs have been converted into USO clubs as part of the patriotic fervor. Those who can't serve for physical reasons or who have not been able to enlist are quickly becoming second-class citizens, as we see in the form of restaurant dishwasher Wally, who has a girlfriend Betty Douglas. She's joined the USO, and can no longer dance with Wally since men who aren't enlisted aren't allowed at the USO club. Not only that, but servicemen dining in the restaurant where Wally works, like Sgt. Tree (Dan Aykroyd) and his crew, treat the unenlisted like dirt.

As for Betty, she's lived in a seaside house out Santa Monica way with her parents (Ned Beatty and Lorraine Gary), and this would be a perfect place for the Americans to set up a lookout point to check for the possibility of Japanese subs or aircraft; indeed, Sgt. Tree wants the Douglases to set up an anti-aircraft battery on their property as part of the war effort.

Regarding aircraft, the Americans are also scrambling military planes to do patrol duty, with Capt. Wild Bill Kelso (John Belushi) being one of the pilots and getting a little too enthusiastic in doing his duty. As for the general in charge of security for the whole of the west coast, "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell (the one real person in the story, played by Robert Stack), he's busy at a screening of Dumbo and has no idea of the increasing mayhem happening around him in Los Angeles.

It's a bit of a sprawling synopsis, and indeed 1941 is a sprawling movie with a large cast and a lot happening that all more or less comes together by the finale. As another sign of how sprawling it is, director Steven Spielberg filmed it with an original cut that lasted nearly two and a half hours, although this was edited down to just under two hours for the theatrical release as well as the print that Pluto ran.

1941 as I said, is generally considered a famous bomb, although in real life it did make a modest profit. The reputation is more down to critical reception and the fact that it wasn't as successful as Spielberg's previous blockbusters, and it's not hard to see why the critics didn't rate it so highly. A lot of the humor is way too manic, with scenes going on way too long (the fight at the USO club) and plot threads feel like they're ignored if not abandoned. Several IMDb reviews I read compared 1941 to It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, but that movie had a coherent goal for all of the characters to be heading toward in the form of the money buried under the big W. 1941 doesn't have such a goal to resolve the plot, so even though a lot of main characters wind up together at the end, getting there feels a lot more disjointed.

But, as always, you may want to watch for yourself and form your own opinions.

Empire of the Sun

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR since not long after I got the current DVR, which has been over two years, is Empire of the Sun. I think I left it so long because I've become increasingly reluctant to set down for longer movies unless I've got a long weekend, and with this running a good two and a half hours, I wanted to wait for another long weekend. So that's now, and I finally got around to watching it.

A young Christian Bale (and it's only coincidental that I mentioned him in the Thursday Movie Picks yesterday) plays Jim Graham, who at the start of the movie is living in Shanghai in the autumn of 1941, with the starting date probably being Sunday, December 7 based on the events in the opening. For those who don't know history, China was relatively weak following the Opium Wars in the middle of the 19th century, with the result that a whole bunch of countries were able to obtain business concessions in Shanghai, along with setting up expatriate communities that were effectively enclaves, immune from Chinese law. Each nationality had its own enclave, more or less, and the Grahams are living in one of those enclaves, living a life that's a fairly high standard even compared to the average person in the UK proper, never mind what the Chinese in Shanghai would have experienced.

Now, the Japanese had already invaded China quite a few years earlier, taking over the rest of Shanghai in 1937, but hadn't attacked the rest of Southeast Asia yet, as places like Malaya (which you may recall from the Claudette Colbert movie Three Came Home) wouldn't be conquered until the beginning of 1942. But the Japanese occupation of the Shanghai enclave coincided with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Some Westerners had already left Shanghai, seeing the writing on the wall, but many didn't, and now that Japan was attacking, there was a mass panic to try to get out now.

In that panic, Jim gets separated from his parents. Not knowing what to do, he goes back to his house, thinking that his parents are going to show up. They were successfully evacuated, so of course they're not going to be showing up at the house, and the technically orphaned Jim has the run of the place, at least for a couple of days until the food runs out. He goes outside to try to surrender to the Japanese, but they don't comprehend what's going on, and who cares about an orphaned kid, even a westerner?

Down at the river, Jim is taken in by Basie (John Malkovich) and Frank (Joe Pantoliano), two Americans who having been living the sort of life that would be the real sort of life Bob Hope and Bing Crosby would have faced in the Road movies: conning their way through, but nothing romantic about it. Young Jim is nothing more than a burden, at least until he's able to tell the Americans where his neighborhood is and that there's stuff they can loot there. Unfortunately, by this time, the Japanese have occupied the neighborhood, so all three are taken to an internment camp 100 miles up the river.

Amazingly, not long after this point the movie fast-forwards to 1945. We of course know that the war is about to end, but of course the characters aren't so sure of that, even if they might have had some inkling that the tide of the war in the Pacific had already turned. Jim looks remarkably good for somebody who's spent the last three years in an internment camp, even if everybody else looks at least somewhat the worse for wear. Jim is helped to survive in part by Basie, who has been using those con-artist skills he learned on the outside to be a sort of William Holden in Stalag 17, as well as the doctor for the westerners, Dr. Rawlins (Nigel Havers). In turn, Jim tries to help a woman prison, Mrs. Victor (Miranda Richardson), although it seems she's reached the frail enough stage that she's going to die before the camp is liberated.

Except that the camp doesn't really get liberated in the traditional sense. Americans attack the camp, and the Japanese respond by sending all of the prisoners on a forced march that's likely to kill a bunch of them. The marchers wind up at an outdoor storage facility that includes some of the Grahams' household goods, which have held up as well as Jim, this again being amazing since the stuff was probably left outside for years. And wouldn't you know it, but this coincides with the American atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Jim, despite having been separated from all of the other prisoners, is technically free, but is he going to be able to survive until help can arrive?

Empire of the Sun is a movie that's physically beautiful to watch, thanks to director Steven Spielberg and his cinematographer having a good grasp on what would make for good imagery. However, the story seems surprisingly flaccid. The movie is based on a book that is supposedly based on the real reminiscences of somebody who had survived one of the Chinese internment camps, but it feels rather clichéd at times. It also doesn't help that the movie is 153 minutes when it probably could have come in under two hours with a better script. Still, the actors do the best they can with the material; John Malkovich is good while Christian Bale shows potential already even if he doesn't quite have the range yet for the darker portions of the script -- not that many child actors did, and Bale was all of 12 when the movie was filmed.

So Empire of the Sun is a bit of a mixed bag, which is a shame for a movie that requires such a time investment.

The Sugarland Express

This week's TCM Essential, at 8:00 PM tonight, is also Steven Spielberg's first feature film: The Sugarland Express.

Goldie Hawn plays Lou Jean, a young woman whom we first see at the start of the movie getting off a bus at an intersection in the middle of nowhere in Texas. That middle of nowhere happens to be the entrance to a minimum-security prison, where her husband Clovis (William Atherton) is currently incarcerated. It's a big visiting day, with most of the inmates having people visit them, so Lou Jean's presence here is nothing remarkable. Or, at least, to outsiders it would be nothing worth mentioning. But this is a movie so we know that there's a good reason for Lou Jean to be visiting her husband beyong the hopes of getting a conjugal visit.

It turns out that Lou Jean had been in jail herself, getting arrested on an accomplice charge when Clovis had committed some larceny or another. It's a tragedy that a husband and wife both end up in prison, but the bigger tragedy is that they had had a child together before winding up in prison. That child was put into foster care while the two were in prison. Now that Lou Jean is out she'd like her child back, but the social services department has decided they'd rather give full custody of the kid to the foster family. A mother scorned is a dangerous thing, and Lou Jean is no different. She's determined to get her child back by any means necessary, even if those means are highly illegal.

As illegal as springing her husband from prison, in fact. Somehow her crazy plan to have Clovis change clothes and just walk out of prison -- don't they have a log book of who goes in and who goes out? -- works, at least to the extend that they wind up in the parking lot on the other side of the prison fence, where they hitch what Lou Jean probably plans to be the first of a couple of rides to the town of Sugar Land, where they'll be able to get their child. Except that of course it's not going to be quite so simple. The salt of the earth couple with whom they've hitched their first ride from the prison parking lot have a burned out taillight, which rookie highway patrol officer Slide (Michael Sacks) notices, so he pulls the car over. Clovis, fearing he's going to be caught, takes off with the car while Slide has the older couple outside! So Slide takes off after them, and after a chase and a botched apprehension, Clovis winds up getting a hold of Slide's gun and taking him hostage in his police car, planning to drive to Sugar Land. It doesn't quite work out like that, resulting in the comical and bizarre spectical of a whole line of police cars from multiple jurisdictions chasing aftre them in a long line in what seems more like a procession, or maybe the following of OJ Simpson's white Ford Bronco back in 1994.

Goldie Hawn, certainly when she was younger, always looked like she was stereotypically ditzy, and winning an Oscar for a movie like Cactus Flower probably didn't help any. But she does an admirable job here playing a woman who is in many ways nothing more than understandably desperate to see her child. Her plan may be hare-brained, but that's to be expected, and even fits well with the ditz stereotype. Sure Lou Jean and her husband are committing all sorts of crimes, but the viewer can't help but have sympathy for them. Michael Sacks is also pretty good as Slide, the young patrolman who probably still has all those platitudes he learned at the academy ringing in his ears, and is now confronted with a situation that he never would have been trained to handle, with the result that he develops a case of Stockholm Syndrome before the term had been coined. (In fact, the original hostage case in Stockholm in 1973 thet coined the phrase was handled problematically.)

The story is supposedly based on a true story, although I have to think a lot of liberties were taken by the screenplay, as it seems thorougly unreal. It gets the geography of Texas particularly wrong, positing that going from the prison outside of Texas to Sugar Land would be a long cross-state drive, while the drive from Sugar Land to the border with Mexico would be maybe a half hour or so; in fact it's almost the reverse in that Sugar Land is about an hour from Houston and the border would be five or six hours away. It's quirky and successfully mixes both comedy and drama, as in a scene where they hole up for the night in a motor home dealership and watch cartoons at the drive-in across the way. There's also that poor couple Lou Jean and Clovis first hitch a ride with. Steven Spielberg uses the camera effectively, which is especially noticeable when he films inside the cars.

When The Sugarland Express last aired as part of the Essentials, co-host Drew Barrymore, who had of course worked with Spielberg on E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, had an interesting story to tell about Spielberg, so stay tuned for that.