How I Won the War
by Richard Lester
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DVD details
Actor: Jack Hedley, Jack MacGowran, John Lennon, Michael Crawford, Michael HordernDirector: Richard Lester
Primary Contributor: Roy Kinnear
Primary Contributor: Lee Montague
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: Letterbox, 1.66:1
Running Time: 110 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-09-08
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
DVD Reviews of How I Won the War
DVD Review: Quirky British Dark Comedy
Summary: 4 Stars
"How I Won the War," starring Michael Crawford and John Lennon, was a strange movie that I enjoyed watching over and over again as a teenager, desperately trying to understand exactly what the heck was going on at any given time. Now that I'm older and wiser, I still have no idea! However, this quirky British dark comedy will force you to laugh for reasons you may or may not understand. It's just crazy. One of my goals in life is to become enlightened and understand this movie before I die (which hopefully won't ruin it).DVD Review: Lester's "How I Won the War"
Summary: 5 Stars
Excellent film! Not about the John Lennon icon, the Beatles ("I don't believe in . . ."), popular music, or much else in the way of escapist diversion. It reminds me of Spike Milligan's "Mussolini" and " Hitler" "Downfall" works - and there's a reason for this: Lester (a younger cohort of Milligan) was an eight-year old kid during the blitz. For anyone who was in THAT molar-grind of remote-controlled war, how do you process that?
Our lives and bodies will be lucky if the response - from those who've been hurled into teeth of the current (2008) global nihilist feeding frenzy - is a satire as sublime as "How I Won the War." You'll bust a gut - and it may be a vital organ, like your liver, or somewhere to the north, or south, or east, or west of there.
Now if I could just get a Region 1 version of this for my US DVD player.
DVD Review: I Just Had to Look
Summary: 3 Stars
"I saw a film today, oh boy
The English Army had just won the war
A crowd of people turned away
But I just had to look
Having read the book."
John Lennon sung that in his song "A Day in the Life", featuring on the Beatles album "Sargeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", in 1967. That same year he also co-starred with Michael Crawford in the film "How I Won the War", based on the book of the same name. It's a comedy of sorts. Don't think it works as well, as it's a bit rapid fire with a fragmented and out-of-order plot, but I do think it holds together better than, say, the "Magical Mystery Tour" film.
An enthusiastic grammar school fellow named Goodbody (Michael Crawford) has joined the British army, has been appointed Corporal, and given a troop of men to lead against the Germans, including a certain Liverpool lad by the name of Gripweed (John Lennon), a young man who can go from being happy-go-lucky to rather intimidating, given the situation. Goodbody's platoon troop across the sands of Spain, while encountering mutiny, mines and madness along the way. How did Goodbody win the war?
The answer, though it makes a point, didn't really grab me that much. Kind of goes for the rest of the film, actually. There's too much satire in it to be a light hearted sillyness, yet the constant sillyness takes the punch out of the satire. It's not that there isn't some thoughtful stuff in the guise of sillyness, there's definitely a few lines that really got me thinking, but like I said, it's pretty rapid fire, so it's hard to make sense of what is happening. There was something going on between Goodbody and his platoon, some sort of relationship that was significant, but I couldn't tell you what it was exactly. Don't think it was a good relationship though. John Lennon played an interesting character, I think, a bit geekier than you'd expect him to be. He doesn't get a whole stack of lines, though. It's interesting seeing a younger Michael Crawford too, and I thought the Spanish location was pretty cool.
If you're after some 1960s sillyness with a Beatle, check out "The Magic Christian" instead, starring Peter Sellers and Ringo. "How I Won The War" takes a bit more patience and concentration. It's not neccesarily a bad film, it's just pretty difficult. Three and half stars.
DVD Review: A corrosive antimilitarist satire
Summary: 5 Stars
" Absurd " humour against the absurd of war. Director Richard Lester dismounts the british establisment, the cynical lies and fabricated interests hidden under the smoke curtain of the patrotism, the military discipline, the stereotypes of epics and the delirious glorification and manipulative vision that some films do of war with his juvenile and iconoclast spirit and sardonic comicity. Lester uses techniques of strangeness to accentuate the grotesque side of war and the sentiment of alienation in which seems to move all the time the characters: the movie is conceived as a long chain of satirical vignettes or synthetic thought-provokative gags whithin a flashback narration conducted by the leutenant Goodbody ( a splendid Michael Crawford ), responsible of one of the worst units of the army. Likewise, the frenetic dialogues ( in the army the members of the high command speak loud and fast to their subordinates and don't wait that soldiers think, this is, Lester makes a caricature of the militaries' rules and their tics ) are recordered in a very deliberated artificial way provoking the effect as if we were listening the thoughts of the characters or their words didn't belong to them ( this very interesting narrative resort we can already find with a similar intention in the Fleischer brothers' " talkartoons " ). John Lennon leaves this time the rest of the Beatles to join to the disastrous unit leaded by Michael Crawford, in the role of a completely incompetent leutenant, in this tragic-comic antiwarlike movie.
DVD Review: Not what you expected
Summary: 4 Stars
If you are looking for the typical Beatles movie you will be disappointed with this one. It has some funny moments but this is a war movie, war is not funny. John Lennon is excellent in this film and the movie was put together well. It takes some thinking to understand some moments, so if you are not into thinking about your movies don't watch it. But if you want to watch a war movie that has great actors and director and an interesting plot then this is one for you.
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