How I Won The War
1967
Directed by Richard Lester
Screenplay by Charles Wood
From a novel by Patrick Ryan
CAST:
Michael Crawford – Lieutenent Goodbody
John Lennon – Private Gripweed
Roy Kinnear – Clapper
Lee Montague – Sergeant Transom
Jack MacGowran – Juniper
Michael Hordern – Liutenant-Colonel Grapple
Jack Hedley- Melancholy musketeer
Karl Michael Vogler- Odlebog
Ronald Lacey – Spool
James Cousins – Drogue
Ewan Hooper Dooley
The 60s films revisited series continues…
DVD cover
Face it, this film was mis-sold in October 1967, and the DVD cover with its picture of John Lennon is still mis-selling it now. The names Michael Crawford and John Lennon stand above the title, but John Lennon’s contribution is barely worthy of credit at all. It’s a minor bit part, though undoubtedly it was his name that got Richard Lester the money for some expensive, elaborate battle sequences. On the DVD, it also sits in the middle of a large screen TV with a black frame around it. I’ve only had one other like that.
The screenplay was by the playwright Charles Wood, and recycles (especially in the clown character) some lines from Dingo his anti-war play. It’s taken from a 1963 novel by Patrick Ryan.
Michael Crawford is the star and centre, and demonstrated the willingness to be thrown around, buried, smacked in the face, fall off vehicles, be dropped from great heights and immersed in cold water that must have got him the gig in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em on TV.
After that Lee Montague as the Sergeant, and Roy Kinnear as Clapper stand out among the soldiers, while Michael Hordern stood strongest in my memory as the officer. Jack MacGowran’s Shakespearean clown role as Juniper, a ventriloquist / Al Jolson lookalike / cod General / collector of swastikas is one of the parts with most lines, but I found him excruciatingly unfunny. The ideas is that he’s mad, but Transom repeats, that he’s not mad, just working his ticket (trying to get out of the war). Then there’s “The coward” (Jack Hedley) who claims he really wants to fight, but is terrified and in shock. He and Goodbody turn out to be the only survivors in a coda.
John Lennon plays Gripeweed, Goodbody’s obsequious batman, who claims to be a Moseley (British fascist leader) supporter and who thinks fascism will rule after the war.
Our stars at the beginning: John Lennon & Michael Crawford (Adolf Hitler is running the scoreboard at the match)
Back to 1967 … I saw it twice in quick succession and thought it (then) brilliant. Richard Lester had directed It’s Trad Dad, A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, The Knack and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. How hot can you get? We were desperate to see the revelation of John Lennon with a haircut (girls wept at the news, just as they did when Elvis joined the army). It preceded the World War One film Oh, What A Lovely War? by two years, but Joan Littlewood’s original musical version of Oh, What A Lovely War? dated from 1963 and is a huge influence, though perversely, given Lennon’s presence, the only musical score for How I Won The War is instrumental.
The platoon in civvies
The central character is an ultra-patriotic lower middle class (class features so strongly) lad (Michael Crawford) who is a wartime recruited army officer, Lieutenant Goodbody. He has command of the 4th Musketeers 3rd Platoon (muskets invoke the Battle of Waterloo) of conscripts, assisted by the classic regular sergeant, Transom (Lee Montague). While Transom’s sergeants stripes are always visible, Lieutenant Goodbody invariably addresses him as ‘Corporal.’ After officer training, they’re off to North Africa, where they are assigned to go three days into the desert and set up an advance cricket pitch at a German-held oasis. The cricket pitch has to be ready for R&R when the army eventually gets that far. The action moves to the Invasion of France, and finally to the last bridge over the River Rhine. Michal Crawford’s character is a prisoner of war, and buys the bridge from the German officer in charge,
Karl Michael Vogler as Odlebog with Michael Crawford as Goodbody
It fashionably plays with time, and switches from colour to monochrome (rather than black & white film) constantly. Real war film from WW2 (Dunkirk, D-Day, El Alamein) is mixed in with filmed material where we see some of the platoon. What looks like Dunkirk is mainly, I think, the 1958 film Dunkirk. They show a soldier dying, and he looks very much like Colin Douglas from A Family At War to me, though it’s not listed on his IMDB credits. The tinted monochrome masks the joins, though the final battle in Europe is all tinted monochrome, then back to colour for the Rhine Bridge where Goodbody gets on well with the urbane German officer, Odlebog. Odlebog, a watercolour painter, realizes that Goodbody is a natural fascist at heart. There are lots of tricksy bits, the main one being that as platoon members are killed, they stay with the platoon but are one colour from head to foot.
The pink and green ones have been killed
The reason it stands so strongly in my memory is that forty years on, a few lines are still in common use among my close friends (whom I probably saw it with). We mis-remembered them, but Beware the wily Pathan! became our idiolect / catch phrase, while any intelligent or corrective remark is met with Grammar school boy, eh? And we all were. And we understood the snotty but ignorant put down perfectly.
I paused the DVD and wrote down most of the bit we remembered so well. Michael Hordern is the colonel, addressing the officer trainees in a rebuilt World War One trench. That’s how he thinks WW2 will be fought, with gas attacks a major issue. Goodbody (Crawford) says:
Goodbody: I took care to talk as far back in the mouth as possible, being a grammar school lad.
That means he hums and haws and says “gorn” for “gone” to sound upper class.
Michael Hordern as Grapple
Then Colonel Grapple addresses them on the Pathan, who are the Pashtun people of Pakistan and Afghanistan:
Grapple: Never underrate the wily Pathan. What we’re going on to now is the wily Pathan, followed the use of and handling of anti-gas carpet. The Pathan lives in India. India is a hot, strange country. It’s full of wily Pathans and they’re up to wily things, which is why I always wear spurs, even in cold weather. Now, my advice to you is always to keep your rifle strapped to a suitable portion of your body – your leg is good. Otherwise, you’ll find the wily Pathan will strip himself mother-naked, grease himself all over, slippery as an eel and make off with your rifle, which is a crime.
Goodbody: Sir, has the Pathan gone over to Hitler, sir?
Grapple: Grammar school boy?
Goodbody: Sir?
Grapple: No, he has not. Too wily for that, the wily Pathan. you’ll find.
Goodbody: Then shall we be fighting him in this war?
Grapple: Of course we will, boy. The British army has always fought the wily Pathan. Stripped mother-naked, under the tent brailings like a snake, he is.
Goodbody: Why?
Grapple: Why, what? Why, what? We want to get on to gas. May save your life one day, gas.
Goodbody: Er, why has the British army always fought the wily Pathan, sir
Grapple: Because he’s a damned wily troublemaker, just like you are, boy. What’s your name in full? How did you get into an O.C.T.U. without knowing your history? God help your men, they’ll be torn apart by the wily Pathan!
Hordern’s portrayal is genius, still so forty years on.
The British obsession with the Pathan goes back to the 1830s, and the percentage greatest ever British defeat, the Retreat from Kabul in 1842. The British army lost 4500 troops and 12,000 civilians (families, servants, workmen and Indians associated with the British, so forced to flee). Only one British survivor got to Jalalabad. 100 British prisoners were later released. That story is told in George MacDonald-Fraser’s Flashman novel in 1969. As it happens, Richard Lester went on to direct the sequel, Royal Flash when it was filmed in 1975. In retrospect, old Colonel Grapple might have been totally wrong on World War Two, but he certainly foresaw the site for future conflicts! Colonel Grapple keeps reappearing throughout the film, usually getting blown up and surviving, finally he is on the first tank to cross the Rhine bridge shouting Forward to Moscow!
Marking out the cricket pitch. Jack MacGowran as the “clown” and John Lennon with whitewash roller and purloined German badge. German prisoners behind.
There’s a rambling bit of Grapple talking to Goodbody in that World War One dugout, and that breaks into a theatre with a stage set and a curtain falling. There’s a lot of that sort of crossover. Later two women in a cinema watch the film of the European battle where Clapper (Roy Kinnear) and Gripweed (Lennon) die. One is the great Dandy Nichols.
Roy Kinnear as Clapper is a continuing comedy role, worried about his wife screwing the insurance man, then the butcher, then the Americans back at home. The insurance man is collecting the weekly sub for Clapper’s funeral policy. Goodbody reassures him and tells him to simply cancel the policy:
Goodbody: You don’t need a funeral policy in the army. Least of your worries. You get the last post.
It turns out that the woman we keep cutting to, observing the action across the road, is his wife and it’s all her fevered imagination.
There are some other lines that stand out. One is one of our John “Working Class Hero” Lennon’s few lines:
Gripweed: I’m working class sir.
Colonel Grapple: I had a grandfather who was a miner. Until he sold it.
The other line I’ve always remembered is the first time Grapple’s armoured vehicle gets blown up in the desert. He commandeers another from the platoon and sets off again, leaving his drivers bleeding on the ground. Later we cut to one lying on the sand with bloody stumps for legs. His wife appears:
Soldier: It hurts …
Wife: Run ’em under a cold tap, love.
The film is very 1967. At the end, two of the single-coloured “dead” soldiers are by the bridge. They note the film’s over (Goodbody has referred to “during this film” just before):
Soldier: I hear that Vietnam’s coming up … but I don’t like the director.
“The Shakespeare clown” (Jack MacGowran)
So now? I still thought the first sequence with Michael Hordern superb. There are good lines, but it’s all a bit frantically flashy and so a tad pretentious … for modern tastes. It’s trying too hard for comedy, and the comic clown bits are embarrassingly dire. Not his fault, he performs them with gusto. It’s the concept.
The film was not well-received back in 1967. Even film reviews looking back found it a “poor war movie” but that’s because it’s an anti-war movie in an absurdist tradition.
Roger Ebert’s original review states:
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.
ROY KINNEAR
Roy Kinnear (Private Clapper) was in many Richard Lester films and they were close friends. Kinnear died after a fall from a horse in 1988 during the making of Richard Lester’s Return of The Musketeers (not THESE musketeers, but Dumas’s French ones). It was the third of Lester’s Three Musketeers films. Richard Lester never made another feature film:
Now, I don’t want to make another film in the slightest. Forty years is enough. I really won’t talk about the ‘The Return of the Musketeers.’ I never have and I won’t now. But I think you can draw your own conclusions. Richard Lester, Time Out interview
MICHAEL CRAWFORD ON JOHN LENNON DURING FILMING (Mail Online, 21 May 2016)
The boys used to come out and stay when we were filming down in Almeria, in southern Spain, in 1966,’ says Crawford. ‘We shared a house, John and Cynthia [his wife at the time], my wife Gabrielle and I. Then out came Ringo and Paul and George, quite frequently.’ They lived in a gated, 19th-century villa on the edge of town. Was it riotous, sharing a house with the most hell-raising Beatle? ‘No, not at all. He was completely professional. He’d never partake of anything before we did work or during work. Afterwards he might have a little smoke.’ Crawford is not talking about tobacco. ‘I’d inhale next to him, sniffing the air. But as soon as he saw me starting to laugh he wouldn’t let me near it, I annoyed him too much with my giggling.”
The villa, Santa Isabel, has a special connection to one of the best-loved Beatles songs. ‘John was writing Strawberry Fields and we’d sit around the room cross-legged listening to him.’ He impersonates Lennon: ‘“Strawberry Fields forever… hmm, I’m not sure about that.” And with a Liverpool accent I’d acquired, fashionably, I’d say, “No, that’s great John, leave it as it is..” ‘Then I could say afterwards, “He kept it in, you know…”’
Lennon used the villa bathroom to record demos of Strawberry Fields Forever, which was released properly as a single in February 1967. How I Won The War came out the same year, and fans were shocked to see Lennon shot. ‘He’s sitting there with his guts hanging out. The film is totally bamboozling but he’s very good.
Michael Crawford, interviewed by Cole Moreton
Advert for blu-ray release, added April 2019
As a footnote there is a soundtrack EP that I bought assuming it was genuine. It’s a bootleg. Here it is …
THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …
Note that Michael Hordern does a similar role in I’ll Never Forget What’s Is Name.
Richard Lester’s work on Petulia delayed release of the film.
RICHARD LESTER
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
The Knack (1965)
Help! (1965)
How I Won The War (1967)
Petulia (1968)
THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …
A Taste of Honey (1961)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Fast Lady (1963)
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
Gonks Go Beat (1965)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Darling (1965)
The Knack (1965)
Help! (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Alfie (1966)
Harper (aka The Moving Target) 1966
The Chase (1966)
The Trap (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
The Family Way (1967)
Privilege (1967)
Blow-up (1967)
Accident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (1967)
How I Won The War (1967)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Poor Cow (1967)
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968)
The Magus (1968)
If …. (1968)
Girl On A Motorcycle (1968)
The Bofors Gun (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1968)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Party (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Barbarella (1968)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)
Deadfall (1968)
The Swimmer (1968)
Theorem (Teorema) (1968)
The Magic Christian (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Performance (1970)
I’ve always wanted to see this, but I don’t have access. As usual you’ve done the fullest review I’ve read. Thanks again.
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