How I Won the War

Director Richard Lester's first "serious" film, coming after the successes of his two Beatles musical comedies, hearkens back to his association with The Goon Show, and his first short, The Running Jumping Standing Still Film. It's filled with literate, densely allusive dialogue and sight gags that leave no sacred cow alive. Lester and screenwriter Charles Wood not only take on the most holy of modern wars, World War II, but they also satirize the conventions of war movies (the diverse company of soldiers, the cultured German, the unfaithful wife back home). Wood's screenplay makes no concession to non-British audiences, with frequent inside jokes about the British class system and culture, but that's a minor irritant. Though the narrative is fragmented by frequent time shifts, asides to the camera, and self-conscious framing devices, the camerawork (by Michael Watkin) and editing are actually calmer than in Lester's previous film, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. As he demonstrated in that film, the limber Michael Crawford is a superb physical comedian, but this film owes its real bite to its ear for telling dialogue, as when Roy Kinnear's Clapper says bitterly of his commander, "War is a picnic if left to the right officers." Ultimately, How I Won the War makes an important statement about the illusions of memory, that a soldier like Goodbody ("I try to find good in everybody," he says after a German officer admits he has killed many Jews) can shape collective memory of a war simply by surviving it. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide

How I Won the War may follow in the footsteps of Dr. Strangelove and be a precursor to M*A*S*H, but while it's sporadically amusing, it doesn't come close to approaching the kind of trenchant satire that those two anti-war films achieve. The film takes place during WWII, as a bumbling unit of Musketeers is sent on a perilous mission to North Africa to build a cricket pitch. The premise is rather funny, and perhaps if director Richard Lester and screenwriter Charles Wood had trusted the audience enough to play it a bit more straightforwardly, the film would have worked. As it is, the film is slapdash and unfocused (as is the case with much of Lester's early work) and the points it makes about the absurdity of war (many of them rooted in the British class system) are belabored and obvious. The film is funniest when it's knowingly self-referential, as when the German commander, late in the film, asks the captured Goodbody (Michael Crawford) if him and his men have had "many humorous incidents." Goodbody says yes, but then reconsiders, admitting, "They not funny, really." Another character, about to enter battle, complains, "We're all going to die under funny names." John Lennon (as Gripweed) is a genuinely charming presence, but he has a very small role. The star of the film is Crawford, who plays essentially the same role (naïve, easily excitable, overly optimistic dunce who tends to shout a lot) that he played in one of Lester's earlier efforts, The Knack. Crawford's shrillness actually fits better in this context than it did in the swinging '60s London of the earlier film. American viewers may have a hard time deciphering a lot of the dialogue, which contains a lot of contemporaneous British slang. How I Won the War is ambitious in its themes, but it's a scattershot comedy that only occasionally hits its targets. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide