STACK #121 Nov 2015

DVD&BD

FEATURE

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realm of zany comedy, and Gale agrees that it’s the director’s most atypical film. “In terms of Steven doing broad comedy, for a sustained amount of time, it is a departure for him, and maybe the reception that the movie got kept him away from that.” 1941 was poorly received by both critics and audiences when it opened on 14 December 1979, but Gale is quick to point out that the movie wasn’t the box-office disaster many believe it to be. “It earned a profit, it just wasn’t anywhere near as profitable as Jaws and Close Encounters were,” he explains. “So in American baseball terminology, Steven hit two home runs in a row and then 1941 was a single, but not a strike out.” Gale believes that if the film had been released in a longer version initially, it may not have been met with such a negative response. “Steven was up against a hard release date in 1979,” he says. “The movie had been promoted and advertised as a big Christmas release, and there was no way he wasn’t going to get the movie out for Christmas, and I think it got short shrift in the editing room – a few more sneak previews would have helped the movie, I think. Steven was concerned about the audience’s attention span – he wanted to get right to as many action set pieces as he could, and that was at the expense of character development. “One of the lessons that Bob [Zemeckis] and I learned from that was to not be

afraid to take the right amount of time to set things up, which of course we did with Back to the Future . We spent all the time that we needed with the McFly family in 1985 so that you understand everything about them, so it all makes sense later on when history starts to get messed up.” At 146 minutes, the extended version of 1941 runs significantly longer than the theatrical cut (118 mins), with some major character development and interplay restored to the first hour. “You really get a much better sense of who these characters are and how all these events are building and on a collision course,” notes Gale. With the extended cut now available on Blu-ray (together with the theatrical version) as part of Universal’s Steven Spielberg Director’s Collection box set, 1941 is ready for reappraisal. “I’m gratified that Steven and Universal saw fit to include the extended version,” says Gale, “because I think people will watch that and have a better opinion of the movie than they did when it came out in the theatre. “I watched the Blu-ray myself and was elated at how good it looked, how great it sounded, and how nicely

Steven hit two home runs in a row and then 1941 was a single, but not a strike out.

the movie flowed in the extended edition. I was very proud of it – I’d always felt that Steven had cut some of the heart out of the movie for the theatrical version. But I feel much better about it now.”

Steven Spielberg Director’s Collection is out now on Blu-ray

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