1980 Week: The Blues Brothers

          The first and arguably best movie derived from Saturday Night Live characters, The Blues Brothers is a gigantic 10-course meal of a movie. It’s an action picture, a comedy, a musical, and a social satire. Yet the film, which was written by star Dan Aykroyd and director John Landis, is hardly to everyone’s taste. Those who quickly lose patience with car chases, for instance, will find some scenes interminable. For viewers who lock into the movie’s more-is-more groove, however, The Blues Brothers is a nonstop parade of bizarre sight gags, ingenious character flourishes, and vivacious musical numbers.

          Best of all, the title characters translate to the big screen beautifully, because Aykroyd employs the same gift for imagining the universes surrounding his creations that he later brought to Ghostbusters (1984), which he cowrote with Harold Ramis. Instead of pummeling one joke into the dirt, the sad fate of most recurring SNL characters given the feature-film treatment, Aykroyd uses the main gag of the Blues Brothers sketches as the starting point for a proper story that’s populated with fully realized supporting characters. The Blues Brothers might not be great cinema, per se, but it’s made with geunine craftsmanship.

          Whereas on SNL the Blues Brothers mostly just performed soul tunes with accompanying physical-comedy shtick, The Blues Brothers gives the characters backstories, distinct personalities, and a mission. A mission from God, that is. Soon after fastidious Elwood Blues (Aykroyd) picks up his slovenly brother, Jake Blues (John Belushi), from prison after a three-year stint for armed robbery, viewers discover their shared history. The brothers were raised in a Chicago orphanage overseen by stern nun Sister Mary Stigmata (Kathleen Freeman), and the orphanage’s kindly custodian, Curtis (Cab Calloway), taught the boys to love black music. Upon reaching adulthood, Ellwood and Jake formed a hot band, but the group fell apart when Jake went to jail. Upon reuniting with Curtis and Sister Mary, the brothers discover that the orphanage will close unless back taxes are paid, so Elwood and Jake contrive to reform their band for a benefit concert. That’s easier said than done, since the musicians have started new lives.

          Additionally, the Blues Brothers gather enemies at every turn, pissing off a country-and-western band, a gaggle of neo-Nazis, a psychotic mystery woman (Carrie Fisher) who uses heavy artillery while trying to kill Jake, and the entire law-enforcement community of the greater Chicago metropolitan area. Sprinkled throughout the brothers’ wild adventures are fantastic musical numbers featuring James Brown, Calloway, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin, to say nothing of the Blues Brothers Band itself, which features real-life veterans of the ’60s soul-music scene. Landis treats this movie like his personal playground, throwing in everything from mass destruction to ornate choreography, and his affection for the material is contagious. (A few years later, in 1983, Landis reaffirmed his musical bona fides by directing Michael Jackson’s groundbreaking “Thriller” video.)

          What makes The Blues Brothers so unique is its three-pronged attack. In addition to telling an enjoyable men-on-a-mission story (the source of the action scenes), the picture delivers innumerable gags as well as the aforementioned musical highlights. Each element receives the same careful attention. For instance, The Blues Brothers features so many quotable lines (“How much for your women?”) that it’s easily one of the funniest movies featuring actors who gained fame on SNL, which is saying a lot. There’s even room in the mix for wry supporting turns by John Candy, Fisher, and Henry Gibson, as well as wink-wink cameos by movie directors including Frank Oz and Steven Spielberg. Speaking of cameos, try to name another movie that features both Chaka Khan (she’s one of Brown’s backup singers) and the future Pee-Wee Herman (Paul Reubens).

          Long story short, if you can’t find at least one thing to enjoy in The Blues Brothers—if not a dozen of them—then you’re not looking hard enough.

The Blues Brothers: RIGHT ON

Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video (1979)

          As one of the architects of Saturday Night Live’s early years—he wrote the very first sketch broadcast on the show—Michael O’Donoghue occupies an important place in the history of counterculture comedy. His work was consistently deadpan, pitch-black, and satirical. It turns out, however, that O’Donoghue’s style loses its potency upon extended exposure. After working on SNL’s first three years, during which he occasionally performed as the onscreen character “Mr. Mike,” O’Donoghue got the go-ahead from NBC to produce a special that was supposed to air while SNL was on hiatus. Predictably, O’Donoughe generated something so acidic, deviant, and strange that NBC balked. Yet because O’Donoghue (and executive producer Lorne Michaels) enlisted famous members of the SNL family to appear in the project—titled Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video—a minor theatrical release was arranged in 1979, with the program’s brief running time padded by the addition of a short featuring SNL’s long-suffering Claymation character Mr. Bill.

          Seen in its currently available form, a 75-minute show with built-in commercial breaks, Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video feels like what it is—an all-O’Donoghue episode of SNL, hosted by the project’s creator in his Mr. Mike persona and featuring a combination of fake ads, faux newsreels, running gags, short films, sketches, and weird interstitial bits. Everything in Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video is either deliberately gruesome or deliberately odd, but very little of the material is funny. (During his onscreen introduction, O’Donoghue promises “an odyssey of aggressive weirdness,” featuring “the cheap thrills, the shabby secrets . . . blue water/white death in search of Michael Rockefeller.”)

          Primarily shot on video, the picture charts its doomed course right from the first piece, an ersatz news report on a feline swimming school in Amsterdam; the piece culminates with an endless slo-mo montage of housecats getting thrown into a swimming pool. Soon afterward comes a long sketch starring Dan Aykroyd as a preacher in a church worshiping Hawaii Five-O star Jack Lord. “We are all guilty in the eyes of Jack Lord,” Aykroyd exclaims. “Let him be your TV guide!” Beating the joke to death, in the grand SNL tradition, the sketch climaxes with a hula dancer performing a gospel song that features the lyric, “Were you there when they crucified Jack Lord?” And that, believe it or not, is probably the comic highlight of Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video. Other random bits include “military test film” of the Laser Bra 2000, a vignette of Aykroyd showing off his real-life webbed toes, a quick scene of the Loch Ness monster being arrested for smuggling drugs, and a snippet of Sex Pistols guitarist Sid Vicious singing the Frank Sinatra classic “My Way”—with the soundtrack obscured while a text crawl explains that the producers couldn’t get the rights to the song. (The Vicious clip was appropriated from the Sex Pistols movie The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, which reached U.S. screens a year later.)

          Aykroyd is the only SNL cast member to appear prominently, although Bill Murray is featured in a small running gang as a homeless man. Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner both pop up for one line each—alongside Carrie Fisher, Teri Garr, Deborah Harry, and others—during a sketch about women explaining their attraction to tacky men. (“When I reach down and feel a full colostomy bag,” actress Jill Davis coos, “I know I’m with a real man.”) There’s a certain demented integrity to Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video, and the project’s strange history lends it a smidgen of forbidden-fruit allure. Nonetheless, this pop-culture oddity is far more interesting as a concept than it is as an actual experience.

Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video: FREAKY

1941 (1979)

          After scoring two ginormous hits in the mid-’70s, director Steven Spielberg fumbled with his epic World War II comedy 1941, which was considered a major commercial and critical disappointment upon its initial release. The wildly ambitious (and wildly uneven) film has since gained more public favor thanks to wider exposure on television and video, and that’s all to the good—1941 isn’t a masterpiece, but it isn’t an outright disaster, either. In fact, the picture boasts some of Spielberg’s most audacious filmmaking, from expertly handled miniature effects to outrageously ornate crowd sequences, and it’s also filled with entertaining performances. The whole thing doesn’t hang together, and the film is far too long, but 1941 overflows with beautifully executed episodes.

          Written by Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis in a madcap style that borrows from the Marx Brothers and Preston Struges, among others, 1941 tackles unique subject matter: the paranoia that gripped America’s West Coast immediately after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In the story, civilians and soldiers alike ramp up defensive efforts like placing armed lookouts in the Ferris wheel of the Santa Monica Pier and situating gigantic anti-aircraft guns on the lawns of beachside homes.
          The all-over-the-map script is stuffed with subplots and supporting characters, and some of the threads are more interesting than others. The business of a German U-boat commander (Christopher Lee) and his Japanese counterpart (Toshiro Mifune) incompetently searching for the California coast is very silly, despite the caliber of talent involved, but when the Axis duo captures and interrogates an American redneck (Slim Pickens), enjoyable lowbrow comedy ensues. A wartime romance between a fast-talking soldier (Tim Matheson) and a sexy military secretary (Nancy Allen) is amusing and spicy, especially during an elaborate seduction scene that takes place in a plane that’s still on the tarmac.
          The goofy stuff involving two Saturday Night Live comics is okay, with Dan Aykroyd playing the leader of a buffoonish tank crew and John Belushi mugging as Capt. “Wild” Bill Kelso, a pilot zooming around the West looking for targets. Some of the best material involves a patriotic family headed up by Ward Douglas (Ned Beatty), since this stuff slyly mixes domestic shtick with wartime high jinks. For sheer absurdity, however, it’s hard to beat the scenes with Robert Stack as a dopey general who cries watching the Walt Disney movie Dumbo.

          From start to finish, 1941 is unapologetically excessive, throwing explosions or hundreds of extras at the audience when simpler visuals would have sufficed, and things like narrative momentum and nuance get bludgeoned to death by the opulent production values. Still, the cast is filled with so many gifted actors (in addition to those already mentioned, look for John Candy, Eddie Deezen, Joe Flaherty, Murray Hamilton, Warren Oates, Wendie Jo Sperber, Treat Williams, and more) that even uninspired scenes are performed with consummate skill. The movie also looks amazing: Spielberg’s camerawork is intoxicatingly self-indulgent, since it feels like entire scenes were filmed simply to justify cool visuals, and peerless cinematographer William A. Fraker gives the whole thing a glamorous look. There’s even room for an energetic score by regular Spielberg collaborator John Williams.
          1941 is a mess, but it’s also a true spectacle.

1941: FUNKY