New Movies: The Shortest War in History

The man in the tattered tuxedo (Frank Thornton) proceeds blithely across the blasted landscape. A gray, gluey mud sucks at his feet. The twilight surrounding him is some hallucinatory shade of orange. He pauses at a ruined shack and knocks on the door frame. "Good evening, sir," he says with elaborate politeness to Captain Bules Martin (Michael Hordern), the master of the house and a sometime surgeon. "I am the 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.

Virtuoso Stock. Martin's patient is Lord Fortnum (Ralph Richardson), who lives in morbid fear of turning into a bed sitting room. He eventually does, of course. Just the way Penelope's Mum (Mona Washbourne) turns into a dresser and her Dad (Arthur Lowe) into a parrot, while Penelope herself (Rita Tushingham) takes 17 months to give birth to one baby and about 37 seconds to deliver herself of a second. All this goes on while the police (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) fly 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 like some pyrotechnical pinwheel and molds character actors (Richardson, Roy Kinnear, the superb Michael Hordern) into a virtuoso stock company. But he also knows the value of good writing, and Charles Wood's script is a model of subdued rage and satiric precision. "I always used to say 'For Christ's sakes, drop it,'" Mum tells Dad as they reminisce about the bomb. "Now, Mum," Dad gently remonstrates, "that was only when you were tired."