How I Won the War
Tags: anti war, satire, flashback

Plot synopsis:
This film contains the memoirs of one Lt. Earnest Goodbody (Michael Crawford) of 3rd troop, 4th Musketeers--albeit presented to us via 2 perspectives.Early on in the film, the lieutenant is captured while attempting to cross the Rhine river and secure the last intact bridge for the Allies (having boarded an inflated raft by himself and been abandoned by his men). He intermittently recounts his story to a German officer (Karl Michael Vogler) while we, the viewing audience, are also treated to what really happened (seeing as he sugar-coats his version of the story).His earliest recollections are of his officer training under Lt. Colonel Grapple (Michael Hordern), who is shown to be as oblivious to the suffering of his charges as Goodbody proves to be. During the introduction of the story (and shortly thereafter), we meet the men under Goodbody's command:Transom--the unit's suffering second-in-command, who proves to be the only true, hard-working soldier in the group. He is reluctant to take charge of the situations they find themselves in but often does. He encourages the others to kill the Lieutenant and resists the temptation several times. Portrayed by Lee Montague.Dooley--the unit's third-in-command. While he and Transom start at the same rank in the beginning (Corporal), he seems more than willing to place most of the rank-induced responsibilities in the other man's hands. In fact, he acts more like a lackey to Transom than an equal. Portrayed by Ewan Hooper.Gripweed--the Lieutenant's batman (appointed personal assistant, as was common at the time in the British Army). He is a compulsive thief and admits to having been a former member of the British Fascist Party. He seems to show some naivete regarding the true nature of war and the incapabilities of his unit and often is found both chiding and being sycophantic towards Goodbody. Portrayed by then-Beatle John Lennon.Juniper--serves as both the unit's crusty old veteran and the would-be comic relief man. He appears more than willing to spur the rest of the group on to do things but is unwilling to do any real fighting. Throughout the film we see him appear in various comedic guises (such as a ventriloquist with a dummy and a clown). He is perceived by the others to be going insane and as the film progresses; he 'promotes' himself both in rank and as a master strategist (using medals taken from dead soldiers). Portrayed by Jack MacGowran.Clapper--the realist of the group. He is constantly harboring the belief that his wife is cheating on him back home (we find out, mere moments before his death, that she was merely making up stories based on the affairs a neighbor of theirs was having). While, like the rest of the unit, he has little respect for Goodbody, he goes to him for advice numerous times. He also endures the most criticism from Transom regarding his general appearance as a soldier (being told he's improperly dressed for merely having his shirt not buttoned right--although Juniper, standing next to him in the particular shot, is dressed as a clown). Portrayed by Roy Kinnear.Drogue--resigned to dying in North Africa (as he points out repeatedly), he is constantly willing off his possessions to other members of the unit. While he's one of the few to show some level of bravery in the film, he is also shown not to be too careful. Portrayed by James Cossins.Spool--the wireless radio operator for the unit (who never gets to do so). The only major fault that can be attributed to him is that he's probably the clumsiest member of the group (he immediately gets a splinter while holding a fake rifle during training and later sets Goodbody up for landing headfirst in a sand pit merely by knocking into him with a ladder). Portrayed by Ronald Lacey.The Melancholy Musketeer (real name not known, even to himself)--the resident coward of the group, who seems to be completely unaware of what he's fighting for, and why he signed up in the first place. He flees for cover in the middle of battle and at one point even abandons the group (only to be picked up later in the film having hidden in a German truck and claiming to have been captured). Portrayed by Jack Hedley.The unit's first assignment is to land behind enemy lines and set up an advance cricket pitch at an oasis. The purpose of the mission: to give Allied soldiers something to look forward to when they take that particular region. Any other unit would have felt disgraced to accept such a mission but Lt. Goodbody takes it with pride (fearing his men will die of boredom otherwise).The mission immediately is bungled when Goodbody accidentally orders signal rockets fired (giving away their position to a nearby German defense post). In the hustle to avoid being cratered, the unit loses half of their vehicles and Dooley is killed.In a twist of surrealism, each soldier that dies under the Lieutenant's command returns immediately after, replaced by a soldier painted to resemble a plastic army man. From Goodbody's perspective, that man is still alive. Footage shown during the death scenes of these characters is tinted a certain color for each incident (green, then pink, then red, then blue), and the dead soldier 'returns' in that color.With half of their vehicles gone and little fuel remaining, Goodbody decides to raid a German fuel dump on their way to the oasis. In spite of mounting excitement from some of the men (Transom and Goodbody, specifically, with Juniper doing a brief standup routine--during which the two others debate whether or not the man has lost his mind), the raid on the fuel dump ends predictably in failure, seeing as only 3 of the men are willing to advance on the outpost once it's realized that the Germans have heavy machine guns. Drogue is killed (foolishly walking out into the line of fire), and Goodbody is nearly killed in a one-on-one fight with an enemy soldier who is promptly killed by Transom with a bayonet. After the retreat, a light plane spots them and attacks. Goodbody ignores the hail of bullets flying around him to point out how to signal an oncoming plane (having mistaken the attacker for an Allied plane) and goes into a minor tantrum upon discovery that their roller full of water is missing. He spots a group of off-duty Italian soldiers playing soccer nearby (who, it should be pointed out, were on the Allies' side by this point) and immediately spouts racial slurs against them and accuses them of stealing their roller. While this is going on, Transom grabs a submachine gun and shoots down the plane--marking their 'first real victory' (as Goodbody puts it).In the ensuing explosion of the plane's wreckage, the Melancholy Musketeer panics and attempts to flee in one of their trucks. Juniper destroys it, leaving the Musketeer to flee with his pants on fire. The rest of the group carries on towards the oasis (eventually having to go on foot, with the dead versions of Drogue and Dooley carrying the water roller). The men stop near the edge of a cliff, only to find themselves in the middle of a minefield. Spool, going mad with dehydration and heat stress, runs to the roller for a drink and begins to throw a fit after the discovery that Gripweed had let the water out to make the roller easy to move. Goodbody ends up being the last one to find out about the mines (having started doing exercises near the edge of the cliff and discovered that the oasis is nearby). In the ensuing chaos, the film breaks the fourth wall and two ladies (played by the actresses who waved to the Beatles early in the film 'Help!') discuss a similar fit suffered by a son of one of the ladies ("He's not dead, they didn't get him. Missing. Turn up he will, missing he is...").Colonel Grapple arrives moments later (using a jeep he had 'appropriated' from the unit earlier in the film) and gives them some water, and spurs them to carry on and take the oasis. In a lengthy 'death scene' (in which a man in plain clothes delivers a long-winded recount of a joke he gave to his men during the war), the men take the oasis seemingly without a real fight and while rounding up prisoners (the men whistling the theme to "Bridge on the River Kwai" all the while), a rifle lands butt-first on the ground, firing off a live round that strikes Spool in the head.While the men are setting up the cricket pitch (the ground is awfully uneven, forcing some of the men to use dynamite to blast open areas), the Melancholy Musketeer turns up having been hiding in an enemy truck at the oasis. Juniper berates him for cowardice, and in his 'rage,' he strikes the Musketeer, as well as Goodbody and Colonel Grapple. He is put on an immediate court martial (with the Musketeer as his appointed attorney) while the other men in the unit attempt to play cricket with the German captives looking on. Eventually, the General who gave them the assignment arrives with another high-ranking officer, who merely points out that the men are 'rotten bowlers.' Juniper hitches a ride with the officers as they leave (we last see him near the end of the film in a straightjacket with his stolen medals pinned on).During the intermissions of these scenes and the ones to come, Goodbody and Odlebog, the German officer, discuss their views on how the war should be fought and Odlebog is appalled to discover that Goodbody is a fascist at heart. The two men seem to have plenty in common (Odlebog seems to be somewhat negligent of his men, as well) in spite of their current circumstances.The flashbacks then take us to the Allied advance towards the Rhine river. Goodbody's men are among those tasked with making a foothold along the river. Goodbody accidentally shoots the Melancholy Musketeer in the foot, cutting his unit short by yet another man. While passing through a village, Gripweed steals a milk bottle while laughing hysterically, accidentally giving their position away to the nearby German forces. The remaining troops hole up in and around a German farmhouse but are forced to retreat as a tank approaches with infantry as support. Clapper is cornered by two enemy soldiers and stabbed with a bayonet (a bit of irony seeing as how Clapper had not taken a demonstration of bayonet use seriously earlier in the film). Gripweed discovers another British soldier holed up in a shelled out barn, looting a corpse. Gripweed derides the man and dismisses him as an amateur thief, but unfortunately is forced to run when German mortars start raining on the barn. As he crosses an open field, a mortar lands right in front of him, perforating him with shrapnel. He solemnly looks at the camera and says "I knew this would happen. You knew it would happen, didn't you?"As Goodbody and Transom retreat, a German flamethrower operator nearly corners them. They kill the man and Transom flees as the enemy tank approaches. Goodbody yells for him to come back to their cover, and Transom is mowed down by a tank-mounted machine gun in the confusion (spouting regrets of not having killed the Lieutenant earlier in his last breaths).As we return to the present, Odlebog realizes that in spite of his orders to destroy the bridge, he feels it would be much better if he let Goodbody 'have' it as it would end the war and bring his retirement sooner. In what appears to be a slant against capitalism, the two negotiate a price and Goodbody writes him a check for it. Meanwhile, Grapple leads the push to the bridge in a tank and is the first to cross. He runs over Odlebog in the process, leaving Goodbody with a small piece of the cold, hard reality of war that he had missed all those times before (he then shows relief at not having to deal with a bad check as though he hadn't just lost a friend). He then addresses his 'men' (who are now merely just the replacmenets of the dead soldiers from before) with optimism over the inevitable end of World War II.The film ends with a post-war 'reunion' orchestrated by Goodbody, with the Melancholy Musketeer obviously being the only one who shows up. The Musketeer says there was a good reason for fighting, but Goodbody points out that HE had won the war.

Review: Filled with biting satire and brilliant performances from Michael Crawford, John Lennon, Roy Kinnear, Ronald Lacey, Michael Hordern and, well, the entire cast, HIWTW was perhaps a bit too odd for 1967 audiences who expected perhaps a more madcap adventure, but today it deserves not only a rethink - but a reissue on DVD.
(Why this wonderful movie is not available on DVD (at least in the US) is yet another slap in its face.) Richard Lester and writer Charles Wood (who also wrote HELP!
An anti-war film in disguise...
As a "fan" of war films but also a "peacenik" I love this movie.
John Lennon co-stars with the star of Hello Dolly as members of a British military unit saddled with the ridiculous duty of building a cricket pitch during the invasion of North Africa!
Filled with ironic black war humor, it suffers a little from the predictable muddle of most 60's films.Something interesting to note is that John Lennon is first seen wearing his trademark round spectacles in this movie.
Having been asked (for some reason) to wear the glasses for the film he continued to wear them for the rest of his life!This movie is a must for all Lennon fans..
To have the film tinted in several different colours to show the stages of the war was both daring and cool.
One gets the feeling of having witnessed something larger, more intimate and important than just a mere war movie.There are no real heros in this film, certainly Michael Crawford and his troop are pretty cowardly and inept, whereas the Germans are depicted, in the raid on the fuel dump scene, as being content with religious service and a bit of soccer.It is true that history is written by the victors and Michael Crawford's character, Goodbody, is one of only two survivers from his regiment.
He proudly states at the very end of the film that he "won the war".
Maybe he did, but his actions and his balmy enthusiasm show us just how idiotic war can be.My favourite scene was the one with Goodbody and the German officer who befriends Goodbody for much of the film.
"Am I?", replies Goodbody, "but I don't particularly dislike Jews."When the very affable German officer, who is attempting to surrender, is blindly run over by an advancing British tank, we know that in this war the good, the bad and the ugly become mixed up and inseperable.I currently own a very worn out video of the film and am hoping it will be released soon on DVD here in Australia..
A different kind of war film.
The first time I watched this film, it was because I was a big Beatles fan and wanted to see John Lennon's performance.
I was in my teens and didn't understand much of what went on, but at least I made a valiant effort.The second time I watched this film -- about a decade later -- it was because I was now a big Richard Lester fan and wanted to see if I understood a little more of what was going on; I did.
A decade spent honing my sense of irony and a crash course in classic British comedy helped out there.This film is right up there with "Dr. Strangelove" as far as black comedies about the insanity of war go.
And any film where John Lennon gets to say, "Can I rub your ball, sir?
Aside from "The Royal Flash" and "Cuba," I believe I have seen most of Richard Lester's films which are of significance.
Sure, there are awful people like Hitler and Mullah Omar, out there who threaten the world at large but by and large, the war process rarely leads to any resounding political solutions and long-term peace and understanding.
Lester does a brilliant job of poiting this out through the course of this film, and he is helped by some great acting- including a surprisingly brilliant John Lenon to achieve this great satire.
I think Lester's genius can even be seen in his two most blatant commerical ventures, "Suprman II" and "Butch and Sundance: The Early Years" as well as the Beatles movies.
Lt. Ernest Goodbody with his ready learned and endless banalities about duty, heroism and just about anything that comes to his mind is in his clumsy foolishness in a league of his own.Jokes come in such rapid fire that this war comedy has to be viewed several times in order to all of them be taken fully in.
Dick Lester directs the story from mad screwball comedy to short moments of even madder reality -combat, wounding, deaths- and back again without losing any of the films evident power.
Some of the best moments are sprung by satiric takes on war movies and documentaries.
Some of the training sequences brought to mind bits from Laurel and Hardy comedies.At times situations begin to reach a point of surrealism.
The changes and surprises just keep coming.Watching the scene where John Lennon as soldier Gripweed gets killed in a German field has now an enormous effect for reasons easy to understand.
For a thirty years old black comedy this movie still has an awful lot to say..
A motley group of British soldiers in a war driven by absurdity..
"How I Won the War" is a very funny movie that in its own surreal way depicts very real and less than heroic motivations for war.
There is also John Lennon who renders a very capable job of portraying a naive pessimist (perhaps a reflection of his feelings at the time about his role as a member of another group).
And in the end, the entire experience of war is capsulated into a home movie.
In reality, it's one of the worst films of any kind since 1930.Here's Lester's antiwar strategy.
Show John Lennon's idiot minor character bloodily killed.That's it.
Well, maybe all Richard Lester really wanted to do was make an amusing service comedy.
There are more laughs in five minutes of "Sgt. Bilko" than in this entire movie.I remember vividly being unable to stay awake watching this turkey in the theater forty years ago.
(Only two other movies in my entire life have had such a sleep-inducing effect on me, and "How I Won the War" may well be the worst of three.) A few years back somebody gave me the video.
Many people hate this movie because of how absurd and hard to follow it is.
Michael Crawford plays the inept Lt. Goodbody and Beatle John Lennon plays a fascist thief named Gripweed.
Goodbody's troop must set up a cricket pitch in the middle of nowhere.I think it's actually a very good movie.
After a string of solid film successes, director Richard Lester earned the right to join the ranks of the self-indulgent.
Most obviously, Mr. Lester had the wrong war, time period, and esoteric.
A black comedy about World War II, for an audience beginning to argue about what the United States was still doing in Vietnam (mentioned herein), wasn't what the doctor ordered.
More importantly, "How I Won the War" wasn't very amusing or engaging.The story really only comes to life during the final scenes, by which time many viewers would had found something more stimulating to do with their time.
War baby Michael Crawford (as Ernest Goodbody) performs up to the level of his character's name.
Most notable among the "Third Troop of the Fourth Musketeers" is bored anti-war hero and musical artist John Lennon (as Musketeer Gripweed).
"How I won the War" was bound for disappointment.*** How I Won the War (10/18/67) Richard Lester ~ Michael Crawford, John Lennon, Roy Kinnear, Lee Montague.
Here, you are greeted with plenty of reviews that tell you that it's not so bad - some even call it a masterpiece and a hidden gem.Then, you watch it and the cold hard reality hits you - it's just not that good of a movie.
Yes, there are "innovative" aspects such as tinting people and scenes differently, but ultimately this is cheap and adds little.There are far better anti-war films of the same period.
"How I Won the War" with a big star (Lennon) was made in 1967.
Steve McQueen's "The Sand Pebbles" of 1966 is, although a much longer movie, an infinitely better anti-war film that managed to convey all of the same philosophical points as HIWtW (and more) and do it with subtlety, class, and genuine humanity.The saving grace of HIWtW should have been comedy - absurdist or otherwise.
Alas, while the characters spend most of the time speaking in that fast British way as if they were saying something as clever as, say, Monty Python or Fawlty Towers, what they actually say is substantially less interesting.
Take John Lennon (whose role, BTW, is actually a minor one) out of this film, and you would remember it even less than the home movies your second cousin took of his daughter's 4th birthday party.In its favor, I will say that some of the battle scenes are rather effective.
The film's continual use of non sequiturs doesn't help matters, and after an hour or so, I was still trying to figure what exactly this movie was getting at.
I was left to conclude that it was a rather feeble attempt to address the horrors of war in much the same comic way as M*A*S*H did, with far more brilliance and success, a couple of years later.
I just saw this film for the first time last Friday night at an American Cinematheque screening in L.A.
I had pretty low expectations for it but was curious to see John Lennon in an acting role.
I've seen my share of British cinema and particularly a lot of Monty Python, which this film vaguely recalls, and this was a challenging film for me to watch in terms of understanding the humor, the language, and the slang being used by the characters.
Michael Crawford is really the star of the film, and I discovered that a little of him goes a long way.
or A Hard Day's Night, you know a little about John's personality, and it shines through in the same way here.I'd recommend watching this at home on video, where you can stop it and return to it if it gets tiresome, which it probably will.
Someone had a laugh and wrote in his review: "a must all John Lennon fans"????
The biggest draw is John Lennon playing a supporting character.
It's a surreal anti-war dark comedy.
For almost forty years now this movie has been a mystery to a vast audience because the viewers and reviewers miss the obvious: "How I Won The Won" is comedy.
Much like "Duck Soup" thirty-four years earlier made a mockery of the Great War, "How I Won The War" mocks the "good" War (The Second World War.) Richard Lester's directing style brings this movie to his audience in a similar way that Brecht brought "The Three Penny Opera" to his stage audience.
I would have gave this film a 1 but the directing and camera work I though were pretty good.
First off let me say this does not star John Lennon as they imply, he plays a small role in this film.
The movie jumps around a lot and is kind of hard to follow and if there is a message of anti war it's not a very clear one but this is the baby boomer era so you have to consider the source.
There are some humorous parts to the film but for the most part it seemed to me that it was a bunch of rambling on by the characters in the movie with some Monty Pythonish humor thrown in.
So if your looking for a lost classic you won't find it here, I would say check out Bogart in Midnight or currently going as Call it murder at least there for 1934 you will see great directing technique and a great film..
The target here is war, and just how silly men get when caught up in the middle of it, and this is pretty obvious by the five minute mark of the movie.
The production looks very good, recreating the appearance of WWII's North African Theater quite well, but the key weakness is the central story conceit: that a unit of the British Army would be sent into a hellishly dangerous area to set up a cricket pitch.
The idea must have had some appeal on paper to somebody, since the movie got the go-ahead, but unless it had actually been based on a true incident or something, the idea is just too obvious and far a reach to build a movie around, and the occasional shots at army tradition and military thinking (there's an oxymoron) just aren't funny enough to keep things interesting while the absurd story plays out.
John Lennon, for all that he is second billed, doesn't have much of a character or much screen time.
Richard Lester can be a funny and creative director, but here he isn't and as co-writer of the thing he should have realized that the material was lacking.
Catch-22 is a better and more ambitious movie, and so is Oh What a Lovely War..
(The music is great, hence that's not the issue here.) Lennon was a working-class kid with very little education and even less natural intelligence.
If peace is responsible for "heroes" like Lennon, then I'm all for war.For my review of "Imagine", go to: http://rateyourmusic.com/collection/Fedor8/To make this IMDb's most unpopular comment ever, please click "No" below..
I remember that when this film was released there was a great uproar at this attempt to satirise World War 2.Too many of the generation were still around and objected to the contents.I read the critics in the papers ,who all panned it,and so I did not go to see it.I have to say that I am pleased that I did not bother.I have just gotten around to watching it and all I can say is that it is an incoherent mess.Lester seems to try and continually go for cheap laughs,and the insertion of archive film from Dunkirk does nothing to help.It is probably the most unfunny and boring film that I have seen in a long time.So thankfully I saved my 6/- by not watching it at the local Odeon..
Very "good" anti-war movie from 1967.
This movie is against all wars.
You are used to such movie cuts after all these music videos.BTW, I'm very lucky, that we lost the war.
Taking a break from the Beatles, John Lennon starred in the zany "How I Won the War", about a wacky platoon in WWII.
The movie shows that while Lennon devoted his life to political issues, he clearly had a humorous side.
Michael Crawford is excellent as the clueless, Bertie Woosteresque squad commander; always trying to piece things together with a seemingly high class education that does him absolutely no good in the thick of war's irrationality.
The fast-paced gags come in rapid succession, punctuating each working class soldier's senseless death with great comic absurdity.
And it's this illusion for which the working class are forced to fight and die.A fantastic piece of anti-war theatre..
American director Richard Lester's film How I Won the War is a bizarre, anti-war satire, set in the thick of World War Two. It does not only look at aspects of the ridiculousness of war, and the stereotypes of the war films, but also the ridiculousness of the British.
Having been made by an American, the film takes a look at 'Britishness' from an objective view - as an outsider.
Lester integrates morbid battle-scenes into the plot, spliced in amongst the comedic genius of the cast, whilst simultaneously claiming the soldiers as no more than actors playing a game, commenting on the way the war is often represented in cinema - with glory and heroism.
As Richard Lester himself said, "It does reflect a desperately sincere attitude towards the glorification of war by show business...
like a big adventure with extras being killed in the way of a Western." This film is clever - very clever - funny and bitter.
Lt Goodbody (Michael Crawford) is an officer because he comes from the right class: however, he is an idiot (a well brought up idiot, it is true, but an idiot nonetheless).
And, despite Transom's best efforts, members of the platoon are killed, one by one (and in one of many surreal touches, they remain with the platoon in spirit, albeit clad entirely in a unique pastel shade).Dick Lester's absurdist anti-war film is a challenging but entertaining experience, albeit you have to be in the right frame of mind for it.
The cast list is a roster of the cream of British acting talent - we don't produce too many headliners, but by heck we fill up the cast with people who know their job.The elephant in the room is John Lennon.
Not only do I see a parody of war films (such as Lawrence of Arabia, whose theme is used), but it seems oddly appropriate for America in 2006.
By that, not only do I refer to the war in Iraq, but also the corporate mentality that pervades many quarters.John Lennon does steal the movie!
Yet his death scene turns out to be unusually prophetic and surreal, and one of the ironic twists of the story.I don't know anything about the other principals involved in the movie, including director Richard Lester.
However there's no denying that the absurdity of war theme comes through in virtually every scene.
For me, that might be the most surreal aspect of the picture, having grown up as a teenager with the Beatles and John Lennon.
Just as surreal is the fact that Lennon was shot to death almost twenty seven years ago as I write this.
The insanity and absurdity of war and death continues every day, and humanity learns nothing from it.