HOW WON THE WAR I Movie Review

I went to see Richard Lester's rabidly antiwar comedy the night it opened, at a small “art” theatre just north of Detroit in 1967. The place was packed with teenagers (I shouldn't complain, since I was one, too) who had gotten word that John Lennon was making his first non-Beatle film appearance. The audience talked through the entire film, more loudly when Lennon showed up on screen, and I could barely understand a word any of the actors said. A few days later, I went back on a weekday afternoon and saw the film in a nearly empty theatre. I still couldn't understand a word, but I got the drift. Like most of the anti-war films made during the Vietnam years, How I Won the War is set in another place and time—in this case it's a British regiment deployed in Africa during World War II. (In the 1960s, Vietnam existed only on television, and there only on the news. It was banned from movie screens—except by allusion—as if by court order.) Lester and his screenwriter Charles Wood (who morphed Vietnam into the Crimean War the next year in Tony Richardson's The Charge of the Light Brigade) created a knockabout farce about frivolous, dim-witted officers putting the lives of their hapless infantry at risk. It's packed with bitter, sarcastic one-liners that you strain to hear through the muffled, rapid-fire Cockney accents, but the ones you do hear turn out to be leaden and obvious. You wait for the most innocent and sweet of the wits and pranksters to come to bloody, tragic ends, and they do. The frantic, kaleidoscopic editing doesn't help, but with a script like this it doesn't hurt, either. With the young, pre-Vegas Michael Crawford, Roy Kinnear, and Michael Hordern.

NEXT STOP … M*A*S*H, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Oh! What a Lovely War

1967 (PG) 111m/C GB Roy Kinnear, John Lennon, Michael Crawford, Michael Hordern; D: Richard Lester; W: Charles Wood; C: David Watkin; M: Ken Thorne. VHS, LV MGM