Customer Reviews

1941: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A must for fans of John Williams.

Reminiscent at times of Indiana Jones, Close Encounters, Superman, and Star Wars, yet still shining with its own worth. Fun, energetic, memorable and entirely charming.

Oddly, the pure orchestral experience is marred by a "comic" recorded cannon blast used as percussion and one very distracting yet brief John Bellushi voice-over.

If you only want the orchestral version of the 1941 march, look for it on the John Williams/Boston Pops collections. If you love the sound of John Williams' late-seventies/early-eighties scores, buy 1941!

The march from "1941" is propulsive and exciting, and shows us that we are listening to the music for a comedy. John Williams goes beyond this movie, presenting us with wild tunes that keeps us marvelled and entertained. The CD presents us with incredible marches that only Williams knows how to write. And let's not forget 'Swing, Swing, Swing', a track that definetely presents us with a great dancing rhythm entangled with comedy. This is a great CD, in spite of its thirty eight minutes.

...but the movie was a bomb.

The real shame of "1941" was how badly it wasted the music, the actors and the production values. One year after the smash success of NATIONAL LAMPOON'S ANIMAL HOUSE, this couldn't-miss monstrosity lurched into theatres for Christmas of 1979 and laid a massive holiday egg. I was in high school and nobody looked more forward to this movie than I did.

The script was all over the place and nothing seemed to come together. The laughs were few and far between. The direction was...wasn't...there. Nobody could figure out how Steven Spielberg could make instant classics like JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and then turn this out. (He definitely redeemed himself with his next film: RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK). Watching "1941", I kept wondering, "Where was John Landis?" Get him and his KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE team in there.

But John Williams provided a great soundtrack to a lame comedy. It invoked the spirit of the World War II Hollywood movie marches and would've been the perfect music accent or undercut the comic mayhem...if there had been any.

My knowledge of John Williams' film scores is far from complete, but I would bet that if you wanted to find the score in which the maestro's tongue was planted the most firmly in cheek, it would probably be this one.

Bombast. Volume. Cannons. The main theme dominates the soundtrack, and Williams turns the volume up to 11 in an effort to keep up with the artillery-fire, explosions and fighter planes from the Spielberg film. It's raucous, and intentionally so. Whether you enjoy it depends on how seriously you want your soundtracks to take themselves.

My opinion: it works, but actually the theme makes the best impact on the Williams Greatest Hits CD. There it provides a nice counterpoint to the more serious side of Williams in "Stepmom", "Saving Private Ryan", and yes, "Jurassic Park".

The rest of the 1941 soundtrack is not quite as memorable, but it contains (1) some nice period elements, and (2) some very Williams-esque romantic moments (check out "To Hollywood and Glory"). Oh, it also contains carnival-style music.

This score came at one of Williams' peak years, so even if the inspiration does not quite meet a "Superman", "Star Wars", or "Raiders of the Lost Ark", the execution is marvellous. Listen to a track like "The Invasion" and you will hear elements that would be at home in one of these movies.

There are very few instances in Hollywood where a film score is actually better, if not more memorable, than the film it goes with. But when it comes to "1941", this is one of those instances.

Alongside the collaborations of Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, and Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone, no director/composer pairing has ever been as consistently and mutually stimulating as the one Steven Spielberg developed with John Williams. It had begun in 1974 with the Americana-type score for THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS, continued on with the menacing, cello-driven music of JAWS in 1975, and then to ethereal music of the spheres for 1977's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. Williams had enjoyed success working for others as well, including Spielberg's good pal George Lucas on the STAR WARS films and on Irwin Allen's disaster classics THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and THE TOWERING INFERNO, but it was with Spielberg that his genius clearly flourished. And for "1941", he provided a particularly spectacular, rather over-the-top and semi-comic marital military score to accompany the proceedings of the comical paranoia undergone by the populace of L.A. when a Japanese sub surfaces off the coast less than a week after Pearl Harbor. Of particular note is the jaunty March, which has gained a certain cachet for being so brazenly anarchic.

As such, it is not surprising that Williams should have come up with something this splendid, even if it was outside what many would call his own "comfort zone." The problem, however, is that the film it goes with just happens to be arguably its director's worst. With a lot of painful mugging from a cast that included John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, plus the wholesale wanton destruction of Los Angeles, but minus any real sustained laughs, "1941" went well over budget and schedule, and was thoroughly roasted by critics and audiences alike upon its release at the end of 1979. The film's standing has improved somewhat over time, but in general it is still not well thought of. Williams' score, however, was cited as a true high point of "1941"; and this recording proves that rather well.

There is needless to say much about John Williams. He is simply brilliant. The greatest composer of our time wrote a heroic, fast and excellent score for Steven Spielbergs highly underrated action-adventure comedy-spectacle. Each track of Williams is special, and the main title march is a real classic. Anyone, anyone, who loves film music at its best, must own this cd.It is a true masterpiece, a music, which can be enjoyed without the film too.

Truly the track title rulez here!

TO HOLLYWOOD AND GLORY! John Williams understand here probably better than on any other score to use his full-blown orchestra
in a patriotic and bombastic way - yet never too much of it!

What sounds strange at first comes to it's first reality in the funny, sarcastic *and* bombastic MAIN TITLE, a march of course.

Boy, did I love this movie and score at "first sight" and was after this score in 1984 when the LP was very rarely seen. This one score became one of my close all-time-favs and the many outstanding tracks, namely THE INVASION, TO HOLLYWOOD AND GLORY and THE BATTLE OF HOLLYWOOD play in my mind even in rememberance.

Williams even made fun out of the classic SING-SING-SING, this time as SWING-SWING-SWING.

A riot of a score! Rousing trombones, powerful horns...
You gotta love this score! Buy it, when you see it!

They recently brought 1941 on television. I just turned on when there were three women singing in the tradition of the Andrews Sisters. Even though the action of the movie did not grab me it was the music that kept me watching. The singing and the orchestral music they played in the ballroom of the U.S.O. was so great I wanted it in CD quality. After buying this CD I was very disappointed to find that all of the songs by the singing women, especially "Down by the Ohio", were missing.

With only 38 minutes of music on the CD only half of the capacity is used. Absolutely not understandable they omitted the best tracks! This disc might be all right for the person looking for John Williams instrumental music only. For somebody who wants a CD worthy being called "Original Motion Picture Soundtrack" it is not complete and cannot be recommended.