How a 1967 anti-war satire accidentally birthed an iconic look for John Lennon
In short: Richard Lester’s How I Won the War is a surreal, biting critique of military absurdity. While the film struggled with critics, it left a lasting mark on culture. It was here that John Lennon adopted the round glasses that would define his image for the rest of his life.
Released in 1967, How I Won the War was directed by Richard Lester and featured John Lennon in his only non-musical acting role as Musketeer Gripweed. The film follows the inept Lieutenant Goodbody and his 3rd Troop through the Second World War, from the 1942 Western Desert Campaign to the 1945 bridge at Remagen. Lester employed a variety of styles, including docu-drama and direct-to-camera addresses, to frame war as a hollow, toy-like game where fallen soldiers are replaced by actors in bright, uniform colors.
The screenplay, written by Charles Wood, drew heavily from his own banned play, Dingo. It subverts traditional war narratives by focusing on the class-based contempt officers hold for their men and the absurdity of jingoistic patriotism. In one notable sequence, Goodbody and his German captor, Odlebog, find common ground in their shared elitism, eventually discussing the sale of the Rhine bridge as a business transaction—a satire on capitalism that mirrors the novel by Patrick Ryan. While the film is surreal and absurdist, the source novel was a more structured, conservative memoir.
The production had a profound impact on Lennon. During filming in Almería, Spain, he stayed at a villa called Santa Isabel, whose gates reminded him of the Salvation Army garden near his childhood home, inspiring the song Strawberry Fields Forever. He also began wearing the round, granny-style glasses he adopted from screenwriter Charles Wood, a look that became iconic. Despite its ambition, the film received mixed reactions; while Stanley Kauffmann praised it as a ruthless mockery of the killer instinct, others like Roger Ebert found it lacking, and it currently holds a 44% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The film’s legacy remains complex. It was delayed by six months due to Lester’s work on Petulia, and critics at the time were divided on whether its slapstick approach effectively conveyed the horrors of war. Nevertheless, it remains a singular artifact of 1960s cinema, blending dark political commentary with the personal evolution of one of the world's most famous musicians.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: How I Won the War
- Also: How I Won the War
- Also: Wikidata — How I Won the War · CC0
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