Rhapsodies

For this week’s film selection I watched some war comedies.

The most I knew about Richard Lester’s How I Won the War is that it was the film with John Lennon in it. I had seen photographs of Lennon dressed in fatigues with a thousand-yard stare through his trademark glasses.

The film based on the book of the same name by so and so, and tells the story of Lieutenant Goodbody, played by Micheal Crawford, an optimistic proper idealistic British officer who leads his unit in North Africa to create the perfect cricket pitch. He believes he has what it takes to succeed in his mission no matter how many of his soldiers die around him.

This film, even though it was still very funny, made no sense. Most of the time it felt like a strange off-broadway avant-garde play done as a big budget film and because of this it never felt like a good fit.
Still, the theatrical bits were the best parts with all of the cast constantly breaking the fourth wall and dead soldiers represented by the actors painted bright colors silently following their comrades as if nothing happened.

The next film on my list, Norman Jewison’s The Russians are Coming, The Russians are coming! An ensemble film featuring Carl Reiner, Eva Marie Saint, Alan Arkin and Brian Keith, tells the story of a Soviet submarine that goes aground on a sandbar just offshore of a small New England island township. In their efforts to escape the townsfolk find out and hilarity ensues.

This is a fun comedy of errors, with hilarious slapstick scenes, that takes full advantage of the cold war paranoia going on at the time. It also does a good job showing that despite all of our differences, we’re all people… Stupid, scared, well-armed people.