Wednesday, March 28, 2012
On Video / Film Now on DVD: Richard Lester's How I Won the War (1967)
Posted by Ben Sachs on 03.28.12 at 01:28 PM
It’s certainly easier to forgive on DVD, since the format allows you to watch short stretches at a time, and appreciate the humor before it wears out its welcome. The funnier gags tend to be literary in nature, mocking the institutional speak of the British ruling class. The overeager twit hero, Lieutenant Ernest Goodbody (played by Michael Crawford as a variation of his milquetoast character from Lester’s The Knack... and How to Get It) narrates the film, and his commentary contains gems like “We were first deployed to Egypt, or so it seemed at the time.” And Lennon, as to be expected, gets a stream of snarky non sequiturs, some of them amusing. The visual gags revolve around seeing music-hall-style acts (ventriloquism, black face, etc) in a World War II setting. Perhaps this seemed like a good idea at the time, when a public opposed to the Vietnam War may have enjoyed seeing war rendered so absurd (curiously, Lester claims in Getting Away With It, his book-length interview with Steven Soderbergh, that he and Wood didn’t intend the movie to be an antiwar satire). Yet Lester’s purposely disorienting, Godard-inspired editing tends to nullify the impact of the jokes
A cubist music hall revue sounds interesting in theory—though if you disagree, you should probably avoid How I Won the War altogether—and it’s the film’s theoretical nature that makes it worth revisiting. In an era where so many comedies seem indifferent to form (J.R. Jones has noted the particularly deleterious effect of improvisation), it’s refreshing to watch a comedy that errs in the other direction. Lester’s characters often break the fourth wall, change outfit from one shot to the next, or disrupt the comic tone with unexpectedly grave confessions. In doing so, they embody the director’s exciting curiosity of how movies are made and unmade.
