Vaudeville of the Absurd

Like an inverted pyramid, all pacifist literature rests upon a single point: as W. H. Auden put it, "We must love one another or die." In How I Won the War, Director Richard Lestersharpens the point pictorially but blunts it philosophically by focusing on a platoon of World War II tommies hellbent on a suicide mission--building an officers' cricket field behind enemy lines in North Africa.

The story is told in film language every bit as wild as the chase itself. Time is a liquid, flowing back and forth. One second is the future, and the platoon's officer (Michael Crawford) has been captured by the Germans. The next is the past, and he is just starting out on his mission. Lunacy is the order of the day: staff officers exchange bubble-gum cards in the heat of conflict. An ex-cavalry colonel shoots his disabled tank. When a man is wounded, his wife abruptly appears on the battlefield. "It hurts," he groans, looking at his shattered legs. "Run 'em under the cold tap, luv," she advises. Real blood spurts from fictitious wounds. After soldiers die, they return to the ranks--for complex symbolic purposes--eerily uniformed not in khaki but in orange, green or blue.

The basic problem with the film is that the potentially high drama and black comedy are all too often reduced by Lester to a mere vaudeville of the absurd. At times, the kind of war it seems to be attacking is of the class variety. England's upper-crusty Sandhurst snobs are ceaselessly satirized by Crawford and by Michael Hordern as a blimpish colonel obsessed with "the wily Pathan," who claims to understand the working man. "I had a grandfather who was a miner," he muses, "until he sold it." The larger its targets, the more petty grows the film. In deliberately choosing to caricature one of the most justifiable conflicts of Western history, War frequently displays a kind of tasteless, nose-thumbing anti-jingoism, as when a ventriloquist appears with a gross, grating dummy modeled on Winston Churchill.

It is no news to anyone anywhere that war is bloody and cruel. What saves Lester's movie from banality is its dazzlingly surrealistic approach and moments of explosively funny comedy--notably, a court-martial scene in the desert that rivals the Red Queen's interrogation of Alice for sheer illogic. In a generally first-rate cast, Jack MacGowran is outstanding as a mad soldier who could have stepped from the plays of Beckett, while Crawford, as the silly subaltern, alternates hilariously between villainy and vanity. Despite its pictorial audacity and quirky humor, the picture is less impressive as a film against war than as a war against film--the kind of red-blooded Hollywood spectacular that glorifies battle. Nonetheless, Lester's irrepressible stylistic exuberance adds considerable evidence that the four corners of the screen are no more confining than the ancient four corners of the world.

Shortly before How I Won the War opened in Germany, Director Richard Lester attended preview screenings before student audiences in Munich, Berlin and Hamburg. Afterward, he debated the film on the stage with politicians and writers. The results, he remembers, were sometimes quite startling. "One politician began shouting that 'the film is an insult to my English comrades in arms who fought bravely against us, at which point the students in the audience began chanting 'Sieg Heil!' in unison." Such outbursts were the sweet sounds of success for Lester. "Getting these points of view out in the open," he says, "is exactly why we made the movie."

In theme and tone, How I Won the War represents something of a departure for Lester, who at 35 is critically regarded as one of the best comedy directors in the business, a camera master of the tour de farce. From his first cinematic success with a pair of Beatle capers, A Hard Day's Night and Help! through The Knack and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, he has operated with a cheerful disregard for time, reality, clarity or sequence. His films, in more ways than one, cut loose.

Although he now lives in a London suburb, Lester was born in Philadelphia, where he entered first grade at the age of three ("I was bright then, and it's been downhill since"). By 22, he had left a director's job at a local television station to tour Europe and Africa on $2 a day, coming to rest later at the BBC. There he was assigned to Peter Sellers' memorable madcap comedy series, The Goon Show, which in spirit at least resembled Lester's later movies. "We did sketches that had no beginnings and no endings," he recalls. "They would just evolve into totally unrelated situations. You would have a spiral staircase, for example, and down it would be coming a line of U-boat captains and a line of chorus girls."

Lester's first film (in 1959) was a much-praised Sellers' short called The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film, which won an Oscar nomination. Lester was then given a couple of low-budget potboilers to direct, and moved out into daylight with the two Beatles' extravaganzas, which gave the impression of being acted on flying trapezes and established Lester's image as the blithe spirit of the surreal. They also made his fame. "When I lie dying," he says, "the Evening Standard will headline BEATLES' DIRECTOR IN DEATH DRAMA, but I don't mind."

Now that How I Won the War is finished, Lester has plans to film, of all things, a life of Jesus as seen through the eyes of Judas, John the Baptist and Doubting Thomas, based on the novel Salt of the Earth by Carlo Monterosso. His next movie is Petulia, starring Julie Christie, which he shot in San Francisco. In Lester's view it is a "sad, desperate, antiromantic picture" (and he would like to retitle it Romance).

Like all his post-Goon work, the film relies heavily on surrealism, but Petulia-Romance achieves this, he feels, in a particular direction: "Not through the exaggeration of detail and incident, but by means of the distortion of time." Instead of flashbacks, there will be a series of flash-forwards, from almost subliminal, brief glimpses of images that appear later in the film to whole sequences outlining a character's expectations. "The film," he says, "is extremely difficult and complex in that it requires the audience to think ahead. But this is indeed the natural way people think."

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