Somewhere in the midway... (some spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (4 August 2000)

Many people praise or trash this film as a comedy, which is a limiting idea because humor is so subjective. You laugh or you don't. It's correct to compare this movie's humor with "Blues Brothers" and "Mad Mad World" as some have done--and that tells you whether you'll think it's funny or not. (When I was about eight, I thought "Mad Mad World" was a comic masterpiece, and I might have thought the same of "1941" at the same age.) So I didn't laugh at this movie, but I was glad to see it for various other reasons. I agree with everyone that the USO dance-donnybrook was amazing. It seems to be a manic spoof of real-life events: war hysteria, zoot suit riots--I'm surprised they didn't throw in the relocation of Japanese-Americans, except they might have been hard-pressed to make that seem funny. But the movie has it both ways: Americans fight Americans, as Dan Aykroyd says, because they're paranoid and seeing enemies that aren't there (his anti-Jap and anti-Kraut speech, with its absurd Santa Clause rhetoric, could have been lifted out of any WWII movie) and this leads to miles of chaos and destruction, yet at the same time there really IS a Japanese sub offshore preparing to fire on Americans. The Japanese seem "honorable" (thanks to Toshiro Mifune) but their comic fixation on Hollywood, their slapstick antics and satisfaction with firing on an empty fairgound undercuts this. Ned Beatty destroys his own house in order to defend it, but this foolishness is undercut by the fact that he clearly regards it as a victory. The presence of Slim Pickens reminds us of the satiric intent of "Dr. Strangelove" (a much sharper movie). A fascinating movie and the first of Spielberg's WWII trilogy (followed by the fantasy "Always" and the more complex "Saving Private Ryan", which is not the simplistic flag-waver some people think it is.) This film ONLY makes sense in the letterboxed director's cut.