The flop 1979 comedy Stanley Kubrick loved for all the wrong reasons: “It was great, but it wasn’t funny”
As an auteur renowned for their ambitious, thought-provoking, and intellectual pictures, Stanley Kubrick wouldn’t immediately jump out as somebody who’d actively enjoy a bad movie.
After all, the public perception of Kubrick is that of the intensely committed, meticulously prepared, and obsessive perfectionist who’d shoot take after take until a shot was captured to his satisfaction, and capturing that satisfaction didn’t come easy, as many of his former collaborators would attest.
When he saw something in another film that he either couldn’t comprehend or wanted to understand on a deeper level, he used his position as Stanley Kubrick, your favourite director’s favourite director, to call those filmmakers on the telephone and ask them how they pulled it off, underlining his desire to absorb as much information about cinema as he could, whether it affected his work or not.
With that in mind, it’s hard to imagine him getting a kick out of something rubbish. Of the movies that were confirmed to be among his favourites, either by the 2001: A Space Odyssey mastermind himself or various members of his inner circle, the only one that stood out like a sore thumb was White Men Can’t Jump, but it turns out he also had a soft spot for an aspiring protege’s first act of filmic hubris.
Having broken through in a bigger way than almost anyone else before him with Jaws, the highest-grossing release of all time that changed Hollywood forever, Steven Spielberg followed it up with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, another critical, commercial, and awards season smash hit, only for 1941 to find the wunderkind flying far too close to the sun.
Going more than three times over-budget and over 100 days past its allotted schedule, the wartime comedy was a nightmare from beginning to end. John Wayne told him not to bother making it in the first place, and based on how frequently Spielberg has rued the unwieldy production ever since, he’d have been better off listening to ‘The Duke’ than persevering with his first massive misfire.
Like almost every filmmaker of every generation since, he worshipped at the altar of Kubrick, and he was beside himself with excitement when they first crossed paths in 1980, when Raiders of the Lost Ark was preparing to move into the studio space occupied by The Shining at Elstree Studios.
“Saw your last movie, 1941,” Kubrick told Spielberg. “It was great, but it wasn’t funny. You should have sold it as a drama.” It wasn’t great, and it wasn’t funny, either, but when you’re responsible for A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and Paths of Glory, you can say what you want. Unfortunately, 1941 was supposed to be funny, and it failed miserably in that respect.
The highest-grossing director the industry has ever seen may have lived to regret 1941 and wished he could have done many things differently, but as far as silver linings go, finding a fan in Kubrick isn’t bad. He loved the World War II-era farce, even if he didn’t even consider it a part of the very genre it had been chosen to occupy.
