Like an inverted pyramid, all pacifist literature rests upon a single point: as W. H. Auden put it, "We must love one another or die." In How I Won the War, Director Richard Lestersharpens the point pictorially but blunts it philosophically by focusing on a platoon of World War II tommies hellbent on a suicide mission—building an officers' cricket field behind enemy lines in North Africa.
The story is told in film language every bit as wild as the chase itself. Time is a liquid, flowing back and forth. One second is the future, and the platoon's officer (Michael Crawford) has been captured by the Germans. The next is the past, and he is just starting out on his mission. Lunacy is the order of the day: staff officers exchange bubble-gum cards in the heat of conflict. An ex-cavalry colonel shoots his disabled tank. When a man is wounded, his wife abruptly appears on the battlefield. "It hurts," he groans, looking at his shattered legs. "Run 'em under the cold tap, luv," she advises. Real blood spurts from fictitious wounds. After soldiers die, they return to the ranks—for complex symbolic purposes—eerily uniformed not in khaki but in orange, green or blue.
The basic problem with the film is that the potentially high drama and black comedy are all too often reduced by Lester to a mere vaudeville of the absurd. At times, the kind of war it seems to be attacking is of the class variety. England's upper-crusty Sandhurst snobs are ceaselessly satirized by Crawford and by Michael Hordern as a blimpish colonel obsessed with "the wily Pathan," who claims to understand the working man. "I had a grandfather who was a miner," he muses, "until he sold it." The larger its targets, the more petty grows the film. In deliberately choosing to caricature one of the most justifiable conflicts of Western history, War frequently displays a kind of tasteless, nose-thumbing anti-jingoism, as when a ventriloquist appears with a gross, grating dummy modeled on Winston Churchill.
It is no news to anyone anywhere that war is bloody and cruel. What saves Lester's movie from banality is its dazzlingly surrealistic approach and moments of explosively funny comedy—notably, a court-martial scene in the desert that rivals the Red Queen's interrogation of Alice for sheer illogic. In a generally first-rate cast, Jack MacGowran is outstanding as a mad soldier who could have stepped from the plays of Beckett, while Crawford, as the silly subaltern, alternates hilariously between villainy and vanity. Despite its pictorial audacity and quirky humor, the picture is less impressive as a film against war than as a war against film—the kind of red-blooded Hollywood spectacular that glorifies battle. Nonetheless, Lester's irrepressible stylistic exuberance adds considerable evidence that the four corners of the screen are no more confining than the ancient four corners of the world.