How I Won the War

How I Won the War (1967)

"There's been some marvelous advances in surgery, thanks to war!"

An inept British WWII commander leads his troops to a series of misadventures in North Africa and Europe.

Date of release
1967-10-18
TMDB
5.7 / 10 (40)
Runtime
1h 49m
Genres
Comedy, War
Director
Richard Lester

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: How I Won the War
  • Filmed in: Almería

How I Won the War is a 1967 British black comedy film directed and produced by Richard Lester and starring Michael Crawford, Jack MacGowran, Roy Kinnear, Lee Montague, and John Lennon in his only non-musical acting role. The screenplay was by Charles Wood based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Patrick Ryan.

Production

In writing the script, the author, Charles Wood, borrowed themes and dialogue from his surreal and bitterly dark (and banned) anti-war play Dingo. In particular the character of the spectral clown "Juniper" is closely modelled on the Camp Comic from the play, who likewise uses a blackly comic style to ridicule the fatuous glorification of war.

Lester decided to make several changes from the source material. For example, the novel does not have an absurdist/surrealist tone like the film. The novel represents a far more conservative, structured (though still comic) war memoir, told by a sarcastically naïve and puerile Lieutenant Goodbody in the first person.

In the novel, Patrick Ryan chose not to identify a real army unit. The officers chase wine and glory, the soldiers chase sex and evade the enemy. The model is a regular infantry regiment forced, in wartime, to accept temporarily commissioned officers like Goodbody into its number, as well as returning reservists called back into service.

Filming took place during the autumn of 1966 in the German state of Lower Saxony, at the Bergen-Hohne Training Area, Verden an der Aller and Achim, as well as the Province of Almería in Spain. Lennon, taking a break from the Beatles, was asked by Lester to play Musketeer Gripweed. To prepare for the role, Lennon had a haircut, contrasting sharply with his mop-top image.

During his stay in Almería, Lennon had rented a villa called Santa Isabel that he and wife Cynthia Lennon shared with both his co-star Michael Crawford and his then wife, Gabrielle Lewis. The villa's wrought-iron gates and surrounding lush vegetation bore a resemblance to Strawberry Field, a Salvation Army garden near Lennon's childhood home; it was this observation that inspired Lennon to write "Strawberry Fields Forever" while filming.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended