I have a sneaking suspicion that Steven Spielberg must have seen and loved It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World as a sixteen year old kid and resolved that if he became as big a movie name as Stanley Kramer he'd do a film just like it. In 1979 Spielberg succeeded admirably creating a chaotic classic about a very serious time.
I doubt we're ever going to be ready for decades for a film like this about the days following the Twin Towers. Those were pretty scary days, especially on the Pacific coast where our fleet with the remarkable exception of the carriers was at the bottom of Pearl Harbor and who really knew where and how many the Japanese were following the attack in Hawaii.
It should give you cold chills to think that if it was more than Toshiro Mifune lost submarine with German observer Christopher Lee on it that they would have been met with what we see in 1941. At the time our home defense on the Pacific Coast was commanded by Major General Joseph L. Stillwell known to all as Vinegar Joe. But he could be moved as we see as he takes in a screening of Dumbo which did come out around that time.
Like It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World the cast it populated with some of the great comedians and comic players of the time. At some point or other they all intersect in their comic defense of California under attack from the Japanese as surely as the world was under attack from Orson Welles's broadcast of War Of The Worlds.
There are a lot of memorable performances where some serious players got to show a comic side and really get unrestrained. One example would be crazy National Guard colonel Warren Oates meeting up with equally crazy would be air ace John Belushi. Slim Pickens saves California by his Faux constipation, he really goes unrestrained. Tim Matheson as Stilwell's aide is as horny as he was in Animal House as he maps out a campaign to nail aviation buff Nancy Allen and winds up midair in a plane he knows not how to fly.
Robert Stack plays Vinegar Joe Stilwell the only true character in 1941 and he plays it straight as a string. If he survived this bunch of lunatics, how come he couldn't get Chiang Kai-Shek off his duff and fight those Japanese who were really invading his country? Maybe duty in the Far East was a welcome relief for Stilwell, but not for long.
Be eternally grateful that this was NOT the way it was in 1941 and sit back and enjoy.
