HOW I WON THE WAR (75)

Directed by: Richard Lester (1967)

Starring: Michael Crawford, John Lennon, Michael Hordern

The Pitch: In WW2, a British platoon is led by an imbecilic officer on a mission to build a cricket pitch behind enemy lines.

Theo Sez: A wealth of gags, wheezes, larks and imaginative devices - which is actually a mixed blessing, both because they offer constant distraction without much profundity and, more basically, because many of them just don't work (no doubt the reason why the film, released at a time when kaleidoscopic stylishness was more common and less appreciated, has never gotten much respect) ; but, to quote Sam Spade, look at the number of them. There's asides to the camera, self-referential touches ("Every word of this film has been written in pencil, in my own handwriting"), pauses for music-hall sketches and canned laughter (decades before NATURAL BORN KILLERS), alternating film stock (ditto), deadpan wordplay reminiscent of co-star Lennon's books ("Most of us could swim only loosely, if at all"), weird bits of surrealism, plus a dozen other tricks I've probably forgotten. Above all what clinches it is that, though its theme - class divisions in the wartime army - is similar to other British films of the time (THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE, OH! WHAT A LOVELY WAR), it doesn't do the fashionable late-60s thing of blaming everything on the horrors of the class system : like CATCH-22 its vision is more absurdist, making it clear that War by its nature makes all participants equally ridiculous - the enlisted men aren't significantly nobler (or less lampooned) than their officers. Not the easiest or even the most enjoyable of films, with tedious patches and often garbled dialogue ; but it's an original.