War as Movie Theater: Two Films

Abstract

Because their mixtures of material and methods are so volatile and eclectic, what succeeds in many movies is often close to what fails in many others. Trying to view horror through the prism of comedy, Richard Lester came to grief, despite some trenchant moments, with How I Won the War. Yet with The Bed Sitting Room, despite several failures, his off-center, goonish slant works. The horror in the new movie is World War III, rather than II, which in two minutes and 28 seconds including the signing of the peace treaty (though God knows who was left to sign it) has wiped out all but some twenty odd Englishmen. And they are odd, given to running off at the mouth, stomping around in bemused circles, holing up in caves with their tattered obsessions, cracking wan jokes. The film depicts an upended final solution that recreates the problems it solved. The survivors take up where they left off with petty ambition, sexual lunacy (Roy Kinnear's rubber mania), racism, arms stockpiling, religiosity, psychological bedevilments (someone returning to the womb is offered his choice of wallpaper to decorate the place), and despotism (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in a roving crane ordering everyone to keep moving). The movie's humor derives less from its mixed bag of gags and skits than from the strenuous efforts of all hands to be funny, consequently unnumbed and able to cope with the holocaust they have barely survived. Ripples of nostalgia and memory, mingling with the humors and underscored by a few plangent passages in Ken Thorne's music, are fleeting but strong, despite disruptive gaffes like the flashes to Mao and Wilson leaving 10 Downing Street just at the approach of the B--(a four-letter word that none use). These garrulous caricatures, their English quirks twitching maniacally away, are all of humanity that remains. Working with a brashly theatrical script (the John Antrobus-Spike Milligan play), Lester predictably opens it up by spreading the scenes across a vast landscape. But he also insists on the play's theatricality and tries for a visual style that will combine both approaches. On the one hand, the movie is unabashedly stage-like. David Watkin's lighting and photography are often theatrically multicolored, dividing the screen into layers of orange, red, green. The open-air locations are used as outsized sets, filled with props, details, gadgets. The actors dive headlong into caricature. As Lord Fortnum, who mutates into a bed sitting room and worries lest a y blacks rent him, Ralph Richardson, in particular, is sharper than he has been on the screen in years. Yet the film's post-nuclear world makes these artifices seem quite realistic, in a way. They suggest well-known images of urban pollution-the oil-fouled Santa Barbara beaches, junk yards, filthy waterways. Furthermore, since this postwar setting is happily something that w can still only dream about, the theatrical stylization blends with the realism to form a ream image. The rubble-strewn canyons, the huge mounds of old shoes, the fields of shattered crockery, while never ceasing to resemble stage sets, also embody what we have imagined the world would be after an atomic conflagration. The lighting can be either theatrical spotlighting and atmospherics or poison gas, air pollution, radiation. The locations, even when most stagy, are both naturalistic and reminiscent of real settings in other movies-the jungles and hills of Fires on the Plain, the searing vistas that stun the astronaut in 2001. Lester thus succeeds where he failed in How I Won the War. The earlier movie also featured caricatures going through hopefully surrealistic routines, but the director failed to stylize the locations. Thus, the actions and the dialogues I