1941...A Comedy Spectacular

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Used Cars the next year

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That one I did see in the theater and it was great

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So...was it the story, or was it the director?

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I'm going to put this down as a triple threat... writing, directing and editing.

For the writing part some of the jokes didn't land quite as well as they could have. There were some legit funny lines in the movie, but they missed on some as well. The story was too busy with too many characters and plot lines. You would have one character in a funny situation and then not get back to them for a long stretch.

The next two, however, are what brought this movie down to just enjoyable. Spielberg is quite likely the best big action movie director of all time and he has a deft hand at adding brief comedic interludes. A full length comedy though... wasn't really up his alley. Spielberg tends to do much better when he is producing comedies.

The editing didn't help any either. Some scenes dragged on too long, while some scenes were cut short just as they were getting funny. It can be hard to edit a great comedy film. The first cut of "Young Frankenstein" was so bad some of the people involved thought their careers were over. Brooks spent several weeks carefully editing it and the finished product is regarded as one of the funniest movies of all time.

Some talented, and I mean seriously talented, people worked on this movie and just couldn't quite pull it off. That happens. Their next movie together, "Used Cars", is regarded as a cult classic today but bombed at the box office as well (Spielberg was an executive producer on that one). Yet over the next twenty years those folks put together a string of hits that is staggering to think about. You never can tell how something will do in Hollywood.

he did this in his time off between 3rd kind and raiders.

Its basically split with like an audience score of 50%..still made like 60 million in profit