Reviews

As outlandish and hysterical as the war insanity of 1941 may seem, the plot tracks almost exactly a real incident reported the night of Feb. 24, 1942, in Los Angeles that began when Navy intelligence reported an attack by unidentified objects on their radar could be expected within the next 10 hours. Early the morning of the 25, radar tracked objects 120 miles west of Los Angeles and a blackout was ordered, triggering a flood of reports about enemy planes. Planes wre reported by the coast artillery near Long Beach (25 of them at 12,000 feet). Four batteries of anti aircraft guns at Santa Monica opened fire on a balloon with a flare and all hell broke loose, with so much ack-ack and searchlights scanning the sky that utter confusion reigned for at least three hours with reports of swarms of planes (hundreds in some cases) flying in at every altitude imaginable. Some 1,440 rounds of ammunition were fired at airplanes that never dropped a single bomb. There were reports four enemy planes had been shot down, including one that supposedly landed in flames at a Hollywood intersection. If this all sounds familiar, read on. At dawn, the only damage found was caused by stray ack-ack fire and traffic wrecks during the blackout. The Navy said the next day there were no enemy planes. The Army interviewed people and decided there were at least one to five planes over LA. The War Department then announced the planes must have come from secret air fields in California or Mexico or from Japanese submarines. The next day the Los Angeles Times criticized the "considerable public excitement and confusion" caused by the alert that scared 2 million people. One California politician wanted to know if it was a calculated prank to move California's defense industries inland to other states. The Washington Post followed on Feb. 27 with condemnation of the military's stubborn silence on the issue and the New York Times jumped in on Feb. 28 by calling the entire episode "incredible" and a display of "expensive incompetence." The movie is a wonderful glimpse of this real hysteria, a real incident and with quotes pulled right out of newspaper articles. When Robert Stack wants to know "where are the bombs?" that is the same question the Air Force and Navy asked when reports came in about the thousands of planes attacking LA. All this information is available from government files on Air Force history from the Government Printing Office in Washington, D.C. The Japanese, by the way never flew planes over LA, but did fly over Seattle, they said after the war. I LOVE 1941. It got everything absolutely right. Right down to Belushi's plane crashing into the street and crazies going off searching for hidden airfields near Bakersfield or Barstow or where ever. This was NOT a comedy. It was just about comical people. It should have won an Oscar for BEST DOCUMENTARY.

There should be a video or DVD of this masterpiece. It won TWO Oscars, for goodness sake, so it can't be all bad. It combines exciting symphonic music with breathtaking aerial and ground photos of pre-Columbian archaeological sites in Mexico and elsewhere showing the haunting ruins of civilizations that have disappeared. The narrative calmly tells of the Maya and their superior astronomical science that calculated time by solar eclipses, resulting to a calendar more accurate than the one in use today. The Maya also used the number 0 in their mathematics. But what happened to them? Where did they go? The answer, of course, is that they are still here, living among the people of Mexico and Central America (Mexico is in North America in case you forgot). This is a wonderful cultural eye-opener that puts our neighbors in an entirely different light. I am surprised PBS or someone doesn't have this as a regular fixture in some history studies. Americans have too long been fascinated by the accomplishments of ancient Egypt. That is fine, but similar triumphs have occurred in our own back yard and we have all but ignored them. Where do you think the largest pyramid base (the pyramid was not completed) was constructed? It's still there. Sentinels of Silence spans an amazing amount of time, geography and architecture in 18 minutes. It needs to be released in video or disc and get some wider exposure. Its subject, message and images are all timeless.