You remember how the end credits of The Knack look like acid? Well, I think Dick had definitely been experimenting when he made this, two years later. It's - exhausting. And clever. And almost works. But fails. And you know those delicious bits in The Knack, where Charles Wood writes these great bits of mad, quotidian dialogue, viz "I'm on me last left leg"? Well it's almost like the whole of this film is written in that style - Lennon barely has anything intelligent to say. Though the central idea - a platoon ordered to create a cricket pitch in the desert - is great.
The references to real allied military failures - Dunkirk, Dieppe, El Alamein, Arnhem - don't quite work, and the subsequent colouring of members of the platoon doesn't work at all. It sort of gets into its much-needed serious mode towards the end - a real battle in which most of the remaining soldiers are killed - it needed more of that, more serious Wood stuff (I mean he's great at writing military satires like The Charge of the Light Brigade but I'm sure later work like Tumbledown is more serious).
A spirited cast helps - Michael Crawford, Roy Kinnear, Michael Hordern (stuff about 'the wily Pathan'), John Lennon, Jack MacGowran, Lee Montague, Jack Hedley, Karl Michael Vogler (German officer), Robert Hardy, Sheila Hancock. It was edited by John Victor Smith and photographed by David Watkin. Based on Patrick Ryan's novel.
Like the Laurence of Arabia send-up music in desert scenes, the ending is, I feel, a Bridge on the River Kwai pastiche. There are lots of visually clever and funny moments. So a real mixed bag.
Though loved the joke between the two actors at the end. "What are you up to next?" "Oh there's a new Vietnam thing happening."
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