Word: lennons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...same cacciatore style that works so well with the Beatles or Zero Mostel in a toga. Of the welter of punches Lester aims at his broad target, only a few can land with appreciable force. The rest necessarily have to deflect off each other, mutually weakening themselves. When John Lennon, in his non-Beatle debut, dies, he dies in a realistic ugly field with realistic blood spewing from his abdomen. But he doesn't just die realistically. He sits there, observes the blood oozing out, looks up at the audience, and says, "I knew this would happen. You knew...
...viewer has to be horrified by the wound in itself and by its happening to the one character he came specifically to see. But horror is stilled when Lennon breaks from character, and recognizes the audience out there and speaks to it. In its way, what he says is just as horrible. But the juxtaposition cancels each, in terms of the anti-war message each was to deliver...
...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...
...Walrus is ambiguous enough to keep you wondering how serious the Beatles really are. Richard Poirier, the reigning Beatles explicateur, said last month in the Partisan Review that "the Beatles' most talented member, John Lennon, has written two books of Joycean verbal play that suggest why no one is ever in danger of reading too much into the lyrics of their songs." So don't sell the allusions short...