New Movies: The Shortest War in History

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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, it shows its lineage proudly: a little Marx Brothers, settings out of Krazy Kat, a lot of The Goon Show (altogether appropriate, since the co-author of the original play, Spike Milligan, was one of the show's originators). Yet it is indisputably a Lester film, a product of a passionate, painful comic vision that is helping to establish him, more and more, as one of the world's most original film makers.