Average Rating: 5.7/10
Reviews Counted: 12
Fresh: 7 | Rotten: 5
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Average Rating: N/A
Critic Reviews: 4
Fresh: 0 | Rotten: 4
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Average Rating: 3.3/5
User Ratings: 1,284
Among the first of the late 60s anti-war films that reflected growing concern over the Vietnam War, How I Won the War takes a cold, dark look at the Good War, World War II. In adapting Patrick Ryan's 1963 novel, screenwriter Charles Wood and director Richard Lester offered a narrative fractured by characters making side comments to the camera, stylized cinematography, inserts of newsreel war footage, and plenty of absurdist humor and slapstick. Ernest Goodbody (Michael Crawford) is a bumbling
Jan 1, 1967 Wide
Apr 10, 2001
MGM Home Entertainment
All Critics (12) | Top Critics (4) | Fresh (7) | Rotten (5) | DVD (3)
Patrick Ryan's novel has been adapted into a screenplay which, as directed by Richard Lester, substitutes motion for emotion, reeling for feeling, and crude slapstick for telling satire.
I am afraid Mr. Lester has not added a single discouragement of war, but simply a little discouragement toward patronizing too-pretentious films.
I got no impression from this film that Lester really, personally, cares very strongly one way or the other about war. It was only a currently fashionable subject, a good excuse to make a movie.
Lester's op-pop style, jump cutting from incident to incident, seems too inherently cheerful for the material, which features fountains of stage blood.
Thought provoking, at very least, John Lennon starrer.
This seemingly incongruous mixture will work for some viewers, and, though the seriousness of Lester's intent may not be appreciated by everyone, most should at least find something here to make them laugh.
Dated, maybe, but Lester's gruesomely black anti-war comedy still looks inventive, and manages occasionally to hit home with its blend of surreal lunacy and barbed satire.
It still has an edge most films would shy away from. It's brilliant, bitter, defiant and angry.
This war farce (about World War II) is just not funny.
Ambitious, stylised British satire. Written and acted with conviction, it pulls no punches.
George Bernard Shaw once wrote that England and America are two countries separated by a common language. Nowhere is that more apparent than here in How I Won the War. The accents are so thick and the humor so uniquely British that even when I could understand it I couldn't understand it.
February 3, 2009
Super Reviewer
...a very underratted british comedy...shouldn't just seen by beatles fans but by anyone who opposes war...
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