JoltBlog

This process has been speeded along because of Lennon's personal stature. He is a Beatle, of course, and therefore one of the most famous people in the world. But more than that, he is the hero of a large number of young people in England and America.

Simply by appearing in this film, Lennon has cloaked it in his personal immunity. We know Lennon isn't phony. Therefore, the movie can't be phony, right? Wrong. Although Lester is a great comedy director, he has failed miserably in "How I Won the War." What is worse, he has failed by doing too little, rather than by trying too much. This is not a brave or outspoken film. It has a grab-bag full of technical tricks in it, including the juggling of color, conversations between people who are not in the same place and time, remarks addressed directly to the camera and so on. But in ideas and approach, "How I Won the War" does not go as far, dare as much, or succeed as well as "Dr. Strangelove" did four years ago.

I have compared it to "Dr. Strangelove" because it claims to be a comedy. But it also claims to be a sobering, disgusting look at the murderous side of war and violence in general. It fails here too, again by not daring enough. Even its most effective scenes (as when Lennon is mortally wounded) seem perfunctory compared to the treatment of death in "Bonnie and Clyde," "Beach Red," "The War Game" and the upcoming "In Cold Blood."

Now that we have seen "real" people dying "real" deaths on the screen, we know how a mere movie actor looks when he dies in a movie. He looks like the people who die in "How I Won the War." Indeed, the impact of Lennon's death owes a great deal to that old-fashioned Hollywood commodity, "star quality." If an unknown actor had played the same scene, it would have had considerably less impact. "I knew it would end this way," Lennon says to the audience. "You knew it would end this way, too didn't you?" Yes, because we saw you in Ramparts.

Lester apparently approached this assignment in the same spirit he brought to "A Hard Day's Night," "Help!" and "The Knack." In all three, he showed himself to be a technical virtuoso with a freewheeling style. He dismissed conventional story lines and allowed his plots to develop through the association of ideas. He didn't bother to make sense because he knew movie audiences no longer find that necessary.

Lester also used a very quick style, brought to the movies from his apprenticeship on television. His scenes were short, made up of shots so quick you had to look carefully to get everything. His characters spoke quickly and in an offhand fashion, as if the audience didn't need to have everything spelled out. And a lot of the gags were throwaways (as when Paul sniffs the Pepsi bottle in "Hard Day's Night").

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