Word: crawfords
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...Richard Lester mixes explosively funny moments with comedy of a blacker sort in a surrealistic vision of war, as a platoon of World War II tommies (including Michael Crawford, Jack MacGowran, John Lennon) attempts to build an officers' cricket field behind enemy lines...
Besides Lennon and the crazy-quilt style, the other holdover in this film from Lester movies is Michael Crawford, the "I" of the title, who turns in a perfectly credible, ultimately chilling performance...
...Richard Lester juxtaposes slapstick with hard slaps at the brutality of battle in his surrealistic film about a platoon (Michael Crawford, Jack MacGowran, John Lennon) of World War II tommies hell-bent on building an officers' cricket field behind enemy lines...
...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...
...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...