Sunday Best: STEVEN SPIELBERG MOVIES RANKED - #35- #33

I remember I was talking to a fellow movie buff who asked me who I thought was the best director of all time.  Without hesitation I said "Steven Spileberg."  He said, "I mean, I guess he's done some good movies."  Almost in a geek rage I began to list off all of the classic films in his filmography including Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Jurassic Park, Lincoln, Catch Me if You Can, ET, etc.   I said, "Any director would kill to make even one movie as good as those and All of these came from Spielberg.

Steven Spielberg.

There is no doubt in my mind that he is the greatest film director of all time.  I am in awe of his ability to create incredible pieces of art that also speak to the broadest possible audience.  People accuse him of being too sentimental or too emotional.  But those criticism only reveal the lack of heart in the critic.


Spielberg's movies speak to us because he is one of us.  He is a genuinely decent person from a modest American life with big dreams.  He loves his faith, he loves his family, he loves his country, and he loves his art.  All of that love is present in the best of his films and that is why they connect with us.

Last year, I completed one of my "bucket list" goals and watched every Spielberg feature film, including Amblin' and Duel.  It was fascinating to see early traces of his later style in those early films and to watch him slowly find his own voice as he experimented with so many others.  

So for the next few weeks, we are going to go through and rank Spielberg's movies from worst to best, along with my observations.  Feel free to chime in through the comments section below.

We are going to start with the "Lesser Spielberg" section and work our way up.  In a career as long and prolific as his, he was bound to have some bombs.  

#35 - 1941 (1979)

This is without question, Steven Spielberg's worst movie.  1941 is a comedy set after Pearl Harbor where the coast of California is on high alert for another Japanese attack.  It is also primarily about some soldiers trying to have sex with the local girls.  I recall Spielberg telling the story about how he met John Wayne and asked him to be in this film.  Wayne called Spielberg back to yell at him for going forward with such a terrible film.  "I thought you were an American!" John Wayne snapped.  To be sure, the movie takes an incredibly satirical at the American military, but that isn't really the problem.  This is essentially a World War II version of Animal House, complete with recurring cast members like John Belushi.  While considered a classic, Animal House is a film I detest on many levels, not the least of which is the comedy.  However, humor being subjective, I shall put that aside.  

The story structure is awful, diverting to sequences of little consequence or enjoyment.  The pace is tedious and the characters are all universally awful.  You could tell that this was not in Spielberg's wheelhouse.  This is also the first time you see Spielberg intentionally ripping off his own work with the Jaws sequences at the opening.  I think this movie scarred him so much that he refused to reference anything he had done previously when he made Ready Player One.  If you notice, he hasn't tried to do a full out comedy since.  There are some audacious visual sequences where he tries to create something interesting and compelling from the script, but all it does is draw out the movie with greater tedium.  Everything about this movie lacks the trademark Spielberg heart and so it is the movie that has the least Spielberg in it.

#34 - The Color Purple (1985)

I think Spielberg was the wrong fit for this movie.  Some criticized him for trying to tell the story about a social world he knew nothing about.  I don't think that was the problem.  It wasn't that Spielberg could not empathize with African-American experience in the early 1900's.  It was that The Color Purple is a deeply ugly story.  You may argue that the subject matter is ugly, so the movie must be so too.  But Spielberg proved that wasn't the case when he later filmed Schindler's List, where he captured the horrors of the holocaust without losing a single speck of artistic mastery.  But The Color Purple is a horribly written story that simply ambles as Celie (Whoopi Goldberg) endures abuse after abuse until it culminates in the most awkward family dinner in cinematic history.

In fact, that dinner scene sums up a good deal why this movie doesn't work for Spielberg.  All of the emotional catharsis occurs in this overly long scene set in a cramped dining room with a dozen cast members.  It is so overly talky and visually stunted, but Spielberg was backed into a corner because this is where the script converged the characters.  Nothing about this scene played to his strengths.  The scenes that work best are the ones where he can tell the story of the characters visually.  The scene where Celie is shaving Mister (Danny Glover) while waiting to intercept a letter is incredibly tense to watch.  But too often Spielberg is constrained by a script that is at odds with who he is as a filmmaker.  The entire movie is soaked in a dark and cynical view of the world.  When Spielberg adapted Ready Player One,  he also dealt with source material that was filled with several layers of irony.  But in that case, he adapted the material to match his strengths as a filmmaker rather than try and adapt his strengths as a filmmaker to the material.  He does the former very well, but only learned to really do the latter when he went to Schindler's List.

#33 - The Sugarland Express (1974)

This is again Spielberg trying to find himself.  Sugarland express is his first feature film and it has the tone of a modern day Bonnie and Clyde where Lou Jean (Goldie Hawn) breaks her convict husband Clovis (William Atherton) out of prison to get kidnap their son who has become a ward of the state.  This is very much a movie of the 1970's in its town and style.  It is filled with dark humor and disillusioned character.  All optimism in this movie is seen as fool-hardy.  Spielberg does learn to build up tension and extract incredible emotional drama from the character's faces.  This is best observed in a scene where Clovis is watching a Looney Tunes cartoon that should be funny, but the cartoon carnage only serves to remind him of the real-life violence he is facing.  It is a simple reflection shot, but it speaks volumes.  The problem is that the story is ultimately an empty exercise in futility, as many of the films in the 1970's were (e.g. The Conversation, The French Connection, etc.)

If Spielberg were to remain on this track, I don't think he would have become a director of any real consequence.  He would have gotten lost in the shuffle of young and gruff filmmakers of the era.  You could argue that his later films were very much of the 1980's, but there are two problems with that: 1) Most of his movies of that time transcend their era and are incredibly rewatchable over time and 2) the reason his movies feel like the 1980's is because he was THE main influence of classic 80's films.  In that era, Spielberg was not following others; others were following him.