Steven Spielberg has directed 24 theatrical features to date, and let's be clear about one thing: Not one of them has been a commercial failure. No, not even that one, the one you're thinking of as his major misfire, the one with the reputation of being a complete disaster. 1941, released 29 years ago this week, was a lot of things -- noisy, cumbersome, overproduced -- but it was not a flop.

It cost about $35 million to make, which was absurdly high for a movie (especially a comedy!) in 1979; Star Wars, released two years earlier, had cost only $11 million, and so had Alien, the big sci-fi hit of 1979. But while 1941 grossed only $31 million in the U.S., it made another $60 million or so overseas, resulting in a tidy profit for Universal Pictures. Don't worry about Spielberg or his producing buddies. They did just fine.

Critically, of course, the film was not well received. It was only Spielberg's third big-budget film, after the hugely successful Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and his two small-time productions before that -- Duel and The Sugarland Express -- were admired, too. But Spielberg wasn't one of those cocky young directors that people dislike and want to see fail. Even after 1941 turned out to be subpar, there wasn't much gloating, and it obviously didn't slow down his career. Subsequent "disappointments" like Always and Empire of the Sun (both of which turned a profit) had little effect on his trajectory either. Like his pal Tom Hanks, Spielberg is a man who doesn't fail even when he fails.

1941 is a large-scale slapstick comedy, loosely based on real incidents, about panic in California in the days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. That's a fantastic idea for a comedy (from the safe distance of 38 years of hindsight, anyway), and Spielberg enlisted several high-profile comedians for the ensemble cast, including Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, John Belushi, Ned Beatty, and Slim Pickens. Tim Matheson, recently of Animal House is in there; so is the geeky Eddie Deezen, terribly unfunny but popular at that time because of Grease. Even Lenny and Squiggy from Laverne & Shirley make a cameo.

As usual with these things, word of the huge budget and massive stunt sequences got out well in advance, and many were calling it Spielberg's "Christmas turkey" before it even opened. Everyone knew it was a comedy, and everyone knew that Spielberg didn't have any experience in that genre, let alone in the specific subclass of wacky, farcical comedy, which is a lot easier to do badly than to do well. Adding to the film's woes was its timing. It came just as the new Golden Age of Hollywood creativity -- marked by directorial independence over studio interference -- was on the wane. The 1970s had seen an unprecedented spurt of talented directors making uniquely visionary films, but now the tide was turning the other way as those same directors, having been given too much freedom, were making expensive, bombastic, problematic films like William Friedkin's Sorcerer, Martin Scorsese's New York, New York, and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. 1941 only gave more credence to the studios' notion that they needed to start exercising greater control over their directors, an attitude that led to the cheaply produced, artistically bankrupt, mostly lousy films of the 1980s.

When the film was released, Universal had forced Spielberg to cut 28 minutes out of its running time. That theatrical version, which Spielberg hated, was released on laserdisc, but the DVD has Spielberg's preferred 146-minute cut. The film is hard to endure at that length, especially with the last 45 minutes being nothing but loud, unmitigated mayhem -- but apparently the 118-minute version was bad in its own way, still ceaselessly chaotic but with the added drawback of being incoherent. The longer version might cause more headaches (I've never seen a movie with so much screaming in it), but at least the story makes sense. Looking at IMDb's list of the scenes that were cut from the theatrical edition, I see that some of the funniest ones, including Slim Pickens trying to chop down Christmas trees that are actually Japanese soldiers in disguise, are among them.

Spielberg has copped to the film's problems over the years, but he does stick up for it, somewhat apologetically, in the DVD's making-of featurette. He expresses what the film's fans -- and there are many of them -- like about it: it is thorough and exhaustive in what it's trying to do. Spielberg wanted to make a nonstop cavalcade of buffoonery, mishaps, explosions, and imbecility, and by golly, that's exactly what he did. His vision permeates every frame of the film. It's not enough, for example, for the compass on the Japanese submarine to malfunction; that would be too subtle. To fit Spielberg's vision, the compass must actually have springs popping out of it. And that's just a minor element. The entire film is like that: Why be big and loud when you can be BIGGER and LOUDER?

If nothing else, you can admire 1941 for being true to itself. Spielberg set up some fantastically choreographed fight scenes and destructions (all of them "impressive" more than they are "funny"), and he never compromises. There is no sentimentality. The romantic relationships are purely sexual; no long-lost kids get reunited with their fathers; nobody learns, and nobody grows. It's not even a particularly astute parody of anything, or a deconstruction of war movies, or anything like that. It is pure, absolute hysteria. Spielberg may have struck out here, but there's no question he swung for the fences.

FROM THE TIME CAPSULE: When 1941 was released, 29 years ago this week, on Dec. 14, 1979...

• Star Trek: The Motion Picture had opened a week earlier to a massive (for 1979) $12 million. On the same day as 1941, Steve Martin's The Jerk opened, easily beating it at the box office. Kramer vs. Kramer, which would become the highest-grossing film of the year as well as the top Oscar winner, would be released later in the month.

• On the New York Times Best Seller List for fiction were such titles as The Dead Zone and Sophie's Choice; on the nonfiction list were Aunt Erma's Cope Book, The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet, Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes, and Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff.

• ESPN had begun broadcasting 24 hours a day, seven days a week, three months earlier. The Movie Channel was brand-new, too. You had those, and HBO, and that was about it, cable-wise.

• On broadcast TV, The Dukes of Hazzard, The Facts of Life, Benson, and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century were all new. Welcome Back, Kotter and Good Times had just ended. Fawlty Towers had just finished its second and last season in the U.K.

• The top song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart was "Baby" by Styx. It was about to be unseated, however, by Rupert Holmes' "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)." Other recent #1 hits included "Pop Muzik" by M and "My Sharona" by The Knack.

• The Iran hostage crisis, in which the American embassy in Tehran was seized and 52 U.S. diplomats held prisoner for over a year, had just begun a month earlier. In other international news, the Soviet Union was less than two weeks away from invading Afghanistan.

• The infamous incident at a concert by The Who in Cincinnati, in which 11 fans were killed during a stampede, had occurred 10 days earlier.

• Pop music artists Chamillionaire, Ne-Yo, and The Game and athletes Coco Crisp and Ron Artest were all less than two months old.

• Mamie Eisenhower and Zeppo Marx had both recently passed away. It is possible that this is the only sentence ever to contain both names.

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"Eric's Time Capsule" appears every Monday at Film.com. You can visit Eric at his website, where nothing ever explodes.