SCREEN AND STAGE A Happening Called World War II
Larner, Jeremy
THE MOVIE How I WON THE WAR is a cartoon using live actors instead of animation. Director Richard Lester, full of what one reviewer calls "aesthetic consciousness," props up a group of...
...if you find the parody pointless—man, that's just the point...
...Yet there is no attempt to recreate war's actuality...
...Currently, a tacit assumption is widespread that no meaningful relation is possible...
...My feet are wet...
...World War II didn't really exist, only your heads exist...
...Kind of reassuring when you think about it, or rather, dissolve into it...
...Thus the camera looks down from high above as the company drives trucks in a circle on the desert...
...the references are strictly confined to other films or to the director's imagination...
...For the sake of such cunning games they will endure movies more stultifying than anything on earth except film criticism...
...A soldier about to shoot the gung-ho young officer is checked by his mate with the epigram, "If you shoot one you gotta shoot the lot, you know—before they take their exams and are taught virtue and industry...
...All the motives and feelings, the atrocities, the decisions, the massacres, even the heroism—manifested, disturbingly enough, by human organisms like you and me—don't have to be analyzed, accepted, depicted, or even acknowledged...
...It was only a bad trip, man—a hangup in the heads of some pretty weird people...
...The Marx Brothers (or the Good Soldier Schweik) could baffle and outrage a moral pomposity which brutally intruded upon them...
...One can simply dig what a gas it was when a certain effect was achieved, and were you hip to the bit where Lester cut in Grand Illusion...
...SOME COMMENTATORS seem to feel that Lester has revealed something about the brutality or the absurdity of war...
...Director Richard Lester, full of what one reviewer calls "aesthetic consciousness," props up a group of wooden soldiers who drag a roller across the deserts of North Africa to set up an "advance cricket pitch," and later reappear under fire in a European village, where they die comic-strip deaths...
...Director invites audience to share the unprecedented insight that all human activity is based on falsehood...
...Now the four little boys are assimilated into the audience, and the mere sight of John Lennon spreading open his shell-blown guts is enough to trigger the emotional blackmail of the infeeling...
...That's what poppy art is all about—"significance" and "stance...
...The action in How I Won The War is random, farcical, and metaphoric, united, if at all, by the continuously obtrusive camera effects...
...for it is impossible to mock what is never there...
...THE MOVIE How I WON THE WAR is a cartoon using live actors instead of animation...
...What the in-feeling amounts to is that us little real people are all the victims of the big bad ones and their unreal constructs, such as war and history...
...Art to him is anything blatantly contrived— otherwise how could you tell it...
...It is a way for a film of pretentions to touch all the bases...
...But in this film, reality never shows its difficult face...
...The pleasure of such a view is its insulation...
...Such people find movies marvelous to talk about because one need never ask whether or how the parts of a movie fit together...
...If you object to the shallowness of a given line, you will be informed that Lester is parodying, or "transforming" an older war flick...
...This is more of course than nihilism...
...Finally he is made to go stand in a nearby ocean...
...The scenes of war come in little pieces of dada in which the visual and verbal components are stitched together as if in collage...
...There are moments, nevertheless, of direct comment...
...But secretly we are artists and therefore we can abolish history altogether...
...For example: A group of officers is seen in ridiculous costumes...
...Formerly, the great cinematic artists were those who used film to shape a world that had a meaningful relation to the confusion around us...
...For that is the effect, finally, of How I Won The War...
...OF COURSE SUCH MOVIES could not exist without the verbiage which explains them...
...For there is a certain kind of film viewer who will endure any kind of boredom if he can be assured he is watching genuine "art...
...It would be nice to think that this is merely more dada, but I am afraid it is meant seriously...
...In A Hard Day's Night, Lester had the Beatles go through a maudlin encounter with four little boys playing hookey: pseudo-counterparts...
...it is an assertion of one's own superior vantage point...
...that feelings, motives, and acts are merely colored beads to combine and recombine according to one's own dear daring notions of what will disturb or expand the sensations of the art consumer...
...Such perspective can be harsh—if no exceptions are permitted, as in Celine...
...John Lennon, supposedly playing a Mosleyite fascist, leans out of his truck and screeches, "My feet are wet...
...At all times the personnel let you know they know they're in a movie, obviously by intention, as is made doubly clear by scenes in which earlier war movies are parodied and newsreels of Dunkirk are worked cleverly into the puppet choreography...
...We are staff officers...
...ctrl SCREEN AND STAGE Poppy art must come all wrapped up in an explanation: so that when the viewer has had his obligatory taste, he can throw away the art and keep the wrapper as a certificate of hipness...
...Nor is war really mocked...
...This goes on for some time...
...One watches from a privileged peephole as the stuff of politics or war or history are chopped up and glued back together in absurd patterns...
...Look and see if most of the appreciations of How I Won The War are not panegyrics on Lester's significance and stance...
...But Lester distributes sentimental lollipops throughout his movies to indicate that true feeling is possible after all—but only by tuned-in down-to-earth real people...
...Lester, like some of the new slicksters in Hollywood, has no objection to mixing deliberate nonsense with satire with straight moralizing...
...One turns to camera and announces, in a fairly typical specimen of dialogue, "We are exchanging bubble-gum cards...
...For the viewer who accepts the idiom, World War II was nothing but a series of "images," like so many drug visions strung together in the guise of newsreels and war films...
Vol. 15 • March 1968 • No. 2
