Christopher Lee: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

4. Captain Wolfgang von Kleinschmidt - 1941 (1979)

One of the little-known facts about Christopher Lee is that he is fluent in German. Indeed, in the early years of his career, he appeared in a number of German-language films. But all that study and training can't lift his performance in the next item on our list, which has alternately been branded a cult classic and a catastrophic embarrassment. 1941 is widely regarded as Steven Spielberg's worst film. Coming on the back of Jaws and Close Encounters, it is an ensemble comedy about a panic in Los Angeles following the bombing of Pearl Harbour. One of its many intertwining plot strands (few of which actually work on any level) involve a Japanese submarine, captained by a German officer, whose crews are trying desperately to get to Hollywood and capture Slim Pickens to tell them where it is. Spielberg has freely admitted that 1941 was a failure, that stemmed from the same sense of ill-discipline that had caused both his previous films to come in late and over-budget. But with a cast that includes Lee, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and Slim Pickens, you would think that the overall weight of the performers could pull something half-decent out of the wreckage. Alas, this is not the case, with Lee being given little to do by the awful script and struggling to come across as credible. He's not in the film for very long, but you certainly don't miss him when he's gone.