How I Won the War

For all Richard Lester's twists and turns, How I Won The War is not a good movie. Because it's not a good movie, it's not an effective nor impressive statement against war, which is what it explicit intends to be.

To present this statement, Lester has dumped his full bag of tricks onto the screen, only this time they are smeared with blood. Once again, there are the two female busy-bodies commenting on the action, as in The Knack and Help!. But this time they are discussing the son of one of them, missing in action 25 years before but expected back eternally.

Once again, Lester has breached all logic of time and continuity, as in all his films. Only here there are horrors leaping across time. Men killed wantonly and gorily do not disappear from the film; they go on. But they are painted from head to toe in one of several bright colors to stand as constant reminders of the un-live state that war has sent them to.

The slapstick and punchlines of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum return to this film too. But the funniest seem to precede the grisliest here.

What How I Won The War proves is that a serious anti-war movie cannot be told in the same cacciatore style that works so well with the Beatles or Zero Mostel in a toga. Of the welter of punches Lester aims at his broad target, only a few can land with appreciable force. The rest necessarily have to deflect off each other, mutually weakening themselves. When John Lennon, in his non-Beatle debut, dies, he dies in a realistic ugly field with realistic blood spewing from his abdomen. But he doesn't just die realistically. He sits there, observes the blood oozing out, looks up at the audience, and says, "I knew this would happen. You knew it would happen too, didn't you?" And the camera cuts, with him still sitting there.

The viewer has to be horrified by the wound in itself and by its happening to the one character he came specifically to see. But horror is stilled when Lennon breaks from character, and recognizes the audience out there and speaks to it. In its way, what he says is just as horrible. But the juxtaposition cancels each, in terms of the anti-war message each was to deliver.

A non-stylistic problem of How I Won The War is the unintelligibility of a healthy chunk of its dialog. A lot of laughs must simply be drowned in garble.

Besides Lennon and the crazy-quilt style, the other holdover in this film from Lester movies is Michael Crawford, the "I" of the title, who turns in a perfectly credible, ultimately chilling performance.