How I Won The War (1967)
 A
Hard Day's Night and Help! director Richard Lester
recruited John Lennon (in his first solo acting gig as Private
Gripweed) for this wildly surreal satire on war movies, featuring
Michael Crawford (The Knack) as a blissfully unaware idiot
charged with building a cricket pitch behind enemy lines during
World War II.
Among the eight-man squad assigned to the Lieutenant are
Gripweed, whose aim in life is to be a faithful officer's servant
- and crawling batman; Clapper, whose war-long worry is the wife
he left behind; Transom, a professional soldier and the team's
anchor man; and Juniper, the old soldier of the platoon, always
ready to entertain the troops in the most surprising way in any
place.
In a surrealistic war, the Musketeers tell the war as they saw
it . . . and although set in the 1940's, How I Won The War
couldn't be more 60's in tone - It features abrupt time shifts,
jump cutting and Lester's patented brand of biting slapstick
humour.
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