Word: wars
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Long War. The chip controversy is the latest battle in the long war that traditional foods have been losing to various substitutes. Fewer calories, less cholesterol, no refrigeration, uniform quality and many other claims have been used to persuade the U.S. consumer to switch to nondairy creamers in her coffee, orange-flavored breakfast drinks, soybean meal in hamburger, and simulated bacon. Sales of fabricated foods are rising, but many people feel that the old-time products taste better...
...traveling BBC announcer, and here was the news." He squats in the mire, framed by a gutted television set, and begins to speak: "I am happy to report that after the recent nuclear misunderstanding, peace has finally been restored. This, we are proud to say, was the shortest war in the history of the world. It took two minutes and 28 seconds, including the signing of the treaty." After the broadcast, the surgeon casually inquires of a patient, "Who was the enemy?" "I haven't the least idea," comes the slightly startled reply...
...overhead in a rusted-out patrol car suspended from the end of a helium balloon. A former officer of the volunteer army (Spike Milligan) hides in a bomb shelter, calling out,"Say, have they dropped it yet?" Nothing makes any kind of sense at all -but then neither does war...
This hilarious, crazy film is titled The Bed Sitting Room (well, why not?) and marks Director Richard Lester's second act of total surrealistic aggression against the homicidal excesses of the military. Lester turned everything upside down and used the war-movie genre to satirize itself in How I Won the War, but The Bed Sitting Room, which is funnier and more tightly controlled, makes How I Won look like a warm-up exercise. There has been no director of such prodigious comic invention since the halcyon days of Preston Sturges. Lester throws off sight gags and visual puns...
Proud Lineage. Lester himself shows few signs of fatigue; in fact, he gets better with each film. The two Beatles movies and The Knack had a glossy, TV-commercial cleverness about them that made the chaotic brilliance of How I Won the War all the more surprising and gratifying. Last year's Petulia was one of the few successful American attempts to tell an adult love story, an unusually acute and sometimes vitriolic account of the way two lovers destroy each other. The Bed Sitting Room carries reminders of both the other films and of other styles. Indeed...