“I saw a film today oh boy,
The English army had just won the war.”
These words, from John Lennon’s section of A Day in the Life,
on the Sergeant Pepper’s album, are probably all that many people
know of the 1967 film How I Won the War, which Lennon had just appeared
in. The movie was a commercial and critical failure that really began
the decline in fortunes of its director, Richard Lester, who had just
recently been a 60s wunderkind with the two Beatles films A Hard Day’s
Night and Help! (1965), and the Palme D’Or-winning The Knack…and
How to Get It (also ’65).
Despite its poor reception, the film has not been altogether forgotten,
lurking on the edges of rediscovery for forty years. It’s a
film that even detractors can see modest virtues in, since it’s
inventive and distinctive if nothing else. But perhaps it’s
more than that: perhaps it offers a satirical assault on the warmongering
of popular cinema which is relevant to this day, and as a Brechtian
film of ideas it may be far more artistically successful than those
approaching it simply as a zany comedy might think.
Lester, like many filmmakers, has faced the problem in his career
of having each new film reviewed in the light of the previous. When
he made the rather serious Robin and Marian in 1976, reviewers complained
that it wasn’t as funny as his version of The Three Musketeers
(1973) – it wasn’t meant to be. Following on the heels
of the Beatles films, The Knack, and A Funny Thing Happened on the
Way to the Forum (1966) – a historical comedy with no real serious
intent – Lester’s anti-war statement was likely to be
misperceived. Those critics who were able to engage with the film’s
message were either offended by it (the tabloids) or found it redundant
in light of the work of Godard (Sight and Sound magazine) –
which is missing the point that Lester’s film was an English-language
mainstream product, targeted at (but missing) a far wider public than
Godard’s Les Carabiniers(1963).
Lester’s
starting point was a novel by Patrick Ryan (“But I just had
to look / Having read the book,” sang Lennon) which he disliked.
Working with Royal Court playwright Charles Wood (Tony Richardson’s
The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1968), Lester followed the same procedure
he had taken with Ann Jellicoe’s play of The Knack: explode
the source, then put it back together in a new form. Wood wrote numerous
drafts, taking material directly from the book but ordering it in
unconventional ways and disrupting it with all kinds of verfremdungseffekt
(Lester has ruefully observed that these alienation effects were too
successful: “One has learnt over the years that Brechtian alienation
is a euphemism for audience’s backs seen disappearing down a
street.”)
The resulting film follows a bizarre structure, beginning in the
middle, flashing back, proceeding past the point of the framing structure
into uncharted terrain, and continually interrupting itself with cinematic
tropes like an audience in a cinema watching the film (the auditorium
is mostly empty!) and a wholly allegorical England-Germany cricket
match with Hitler as scorer. Madness reigns.
Along the way, characters step forward to address the audience (Lennon’s
speculation on Why We Fight, delivered as he sits dying from a battlefield
wound, made his wife Cynthia cry: she said that this was just how
Lennon would look when he died), slain soldiers are replaced by anonymous
soldiers dyed from head to foot the colour of the battle they were
slain in (for each battle is colour-coded) and the theme from Lawrence
of Arabia (1965) invades the soundtrack at inopportune moments. Lester
is using every trick in his book to interrupt the action and destroy
the narrative, rather than help them along. Once we accept that this
is a deliberate stratagem and ask why it is being done, we have a
far better chance of getting along with this perverse piece of cinema.
Lester and Wood were dedicated to the proposal that the horrors of
war should not be recycled as entertainment. The film sets out to
argue this, by parodying war-movie clichés alongside grisly
violence. The melodramatic platitudes are rendered appalling in the
face of realistic bloodshed (and recreations of Montgomery’s
least successful battles), and even much of the comedy is designed
to elicit pain rather than mirth. As a soldier lies in the sand with
his feet blown off, his wife inexplicably appears by his side, gives
a heartfelt speech to camera about the nobility of suffering, and
when interrupted by the actual suffering of her spouse, advises, “Oh,
run ‘em under the cold tap, love.” Much of the comedy
IS riotously funny, or breathtakingly bizarre, but some of it is just
a mockery of the kind of “comic relief” used to celebrate
military camaraderie in conventional war flicks.
