'1941': 1 By OWEN GLEIBERMAN Steven Spielberg doesn't direct ovies, he directs carnivals. 1941 is so shiny and bouncy that it's like a child's vision of Heaven-a trip to the biggest, most expensive toy store in the world. The script is a blunt farce about post- Pearl Harbor hysteria in Los Angeles, crammed with stale jokes and wacky characters, and the movie might well have turned into an overblown flop had it been made by some run-of-the-mill studio hack. But Spielberg stages early every scene as if it were the final, show-stopping set-piece. He's a visionary craftsman who makes gleaming, sugar-coated poetry out of the t'echnology of the movies, and his visual imagination is so seductive that he almost brings this manic techno- circos 'off. 1941 is Spielberg's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, alright, but unlike Stanley Kramer's, this one delivers. Though the basic material is dross, there's enough magical inven- zion and brazen low comedy to keep the film hopping for two hours. WHAT'S ALWAYS been astonishing about Spie bergs work is the sense of wonder and fun he's able to bring to his cinematic virtuosity. Spielberg isn't an icy °mechanical master, like Stanley Kubrick. He finds beauty in technology (as in the end of Close Encounters, or the lovely streams of flashing squad cars in The Sugarland Express , and then suffuses a film with an aura of ,.weetness and innocence that extends t..o the characters. Unlike fellow visual innovator Brian De Palma; Spielberg is a whiz with actors, and he can lend touching resonance to, a' bare-bones script. The trio of shark-hunters in Jaws were as memorable as the moments that knocked you out of your chair; the characters anchored the movie to the ground, kept it from tur- ning into a cold exercise in audience -manipulation. 0 1941 is the first Spielberg film that fails to tie technique to anything of emotional substance. Spielberg should be doing romantic comedy, not wacked- out farce, and this script gives him nothing to work with. i the two quasi-romantic leads ($6by DiCicco and Dianne Kay) are hardly compelling enough to hold our interest daring their relatively brief time onscreen. But there's an almost palpable joy in the energy and ingeniousness of the *taging, and in the complexity of the visual details. You can feel the kick Spielberg must have gotten from making the movie, and injecting it with quotes from Jaws, Close Encounters, The Graduate, Casablanca, Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz, and, no doubt, a few others. The characters are ties together in a loose, American Graffiti-style narrative that chronicles the events in a mingle night, roughly a week after the earl Harbor attack, There evidently was some genuine paranoia in Southern California about a possible mainland attack, and a stray Japanese sub- marine was actually cruising off the coast. 1941 punches fact into farce. The sub is a smokey, mock-ominous craft, populated by an inept crew and led by Toshiro Mifune (looking Inscrutably Evil) and by Christopher Lee, as an allied Nazi. The Japanese decide they an poke a hole in American morale by aaunching a full-scale attack ;on Hollywood. (In one of the funniest bits in the film, a crew member points up to a jiggling nude swimmer clinging to the sub's periscope and shouts "Ha-ee- woooood!", his face plastered with wide-eyed, Japanese joy),. Needless to say, they never reach their target: THE AMERCAN side is essentially a ollection of lunatics, war-mongers, Get it together. - The Michigan Daily-Friday, January 25, 1980-Page 5 [he poetry of technology 4 z tlW Gourt I . e. pN E presents A A and nerds. Among them are an airforce secretary (Nany Allen) who can only make love airborn ; a general (Robert Stack) whom D:isney's Dumbo- reduces to a blubbering softie; a scowling, granite-faced marine (Treat Williams) with a manic fear of eggs; and Wild Bill Kelso (John Belushi), a renegade air force sergeant whose plane is painted to look like a shark. Un- fortunately, 1941 rarely manages to live up to its enormous scale in the humor department. The movie has been billed as a "comedy spectacular," but the comedy and spectacle rarely fuse; rather, they co-exist, and the jokes themselves are numbingly ordinary. Belushi's bits include forever chomping on the stub of a cigar and smashing open a Coke bottle when he can't find an opener. In other words, this is Bluto on wings, and it wears thin fast. The spectacle is another story. Spielberg gives this sitcom script everything he has. as if trying to outdo Close Encounters without any help from an alien world. There's a tank that barrels through a paint factory, turning the screen into a volcano of color, and a Ferris Wheel that rolls right out of an amusement park. And the pliysical comedy is unparalleled. Spielberg does with slapstick what Milos Forman did with dancing in Hair, by piecing together Twyla Tarpe's choregraphy through editing instead of simply staging the numbers and letting the camera rojl. The physical comedy in 1941 has been conceived as cinematic comedy. The camera zooms, pans, and dollies like it's on fire, and the bits are spliced together into hyperbolic slap- stick ballets. There's nothing especially clever about an early scene with two cafeteria cooks throwing plates at each other as they jitterbug, but there's such gleeful, breakneck vitality in the filming that it's like you're watching slapstick for the first time. BEST OF ALL is Spielberg's jeweled- showpiece, an electrical dance-hall fight sequence with people sliding on floors and chasing each other up walls, like Fred Astaire in Singin' In the Rain. At the climax, when Treat Williams delivers the knock-out punch to the dancing-fool hero, a neon American flag flashing behind him, the sequence has been built to such an exquisite fren- zy that it's like the final, breath-taking surge in a Mahler symphony. None of which seems to mean anything to critics everywhere, who've branded 1941 a "failure." perhaps because they expected Spiel berg's first comedy to be the funniest movie ever made and wouldn't settle zr anything less. 1941 may even be disappoin- tment to Spielberg fans, because it's lacking the human dimensions of his other films and because parts are bogged down by the infant wackiness of the conception. One wants more out of Spielberg, perhaps, since he's already established himself as our most dazzling enter- tainer. But 1941 is nothing to scoff at. Despite its Claws, it must be the most entertaining failure I've seen .in years. Federal expenditures for Vietnam era veterans have totalled more than $40 billion. This includes some $25 billion for GI Bill education and training assistance and more than $3 billion for VA hospital and medical care. SATURDAY NO COVER! t0Gou th 1140 South University r r Fl, IAL ~YS. Closing our Ann Arbor Store Very Soon! ENTIRE STOCK GREATLY REDUCED IN PRICE -MANY ITEMS REDUCED UP TO Fabrics! Apparel! China! Glassware! Store Fixtures! A Rare Opportunity. HURRY! * orthogonaly on the park 330 E. Liberty at Division, Ann Arbor-662-2600 Bobby DiCicco and Diane Kay find love on a tank in Steven Spielberg's "1941". Benefits for veterans and their families and how to get them are described in a booklet, "Federal Benefits for Veterans and Dependen- ts." It can be obtained by sending a check for $L50 to Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402. 0 The Intel Notebook Careers and Technology at Intel The Microelectronics Revolution- and how you can be part of it. See us on campus at the Business School January 28 & 29. o' Intel is the acknowledged leader in four major product areas: semiconductor memories. microprocessors, micro- computer systems, and memory systems. And we're extending our leadership into data-base management. We have career opportunities available at any of our four great locations -Cali- fornia, Oregon, Arizona, or Texas-in: Technical Marketing Finance Production Planning - Management If you want to be part of the emerging microelectronics revolution, and are about to receive an MBA (and for positions in technical marketing have a technical undergraduate degree); we'd like to talk with you. 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