[The least of Lester's early films] had scintillating moments, and the best of them are fireworks displays that spell out some secrets of our times. [How I Won the War] is Lester at his very best. (p. 30)

[The] script, filigreed with good wiry dialogue, serves as a fine trampoline for Lester. These are numerous "plants" of material—visual and verbal—to which later reference is made, too neatly modulated to be called running gags. There is a barrage of parodic transformations. For instance, a blimpish colonel gives the lieutenant a gung-ho speech in a dugout. When the camera pulls back at the end of his exhortation, the dugout—suddenly—is on a stage, and the curtain descends as the colonel finishes roundly. (Lester does not leave it there. The audience in that theater is sparse and the applause is slack.) A number of incidents are swiftly replayed in different settings, as in a spoof of Marienbad. The music yawns scoffingly: whenever we cut back to these bedraggled desert rats, we get a swell of grandiose Oriental goo on the soundtrack in Lawrence of Arabia style. And we are continually reminded that the whole thing is a film. (p. 31)

With the light-fingered help of his editor, John Victor Smith, Lester caroms the film off a series of colored bubble gum pictures of WW II battles—cheap unreal icons of events that Lester makes more truly unreal. Yes, the film tells us that war is hell and that the most hellish thing about it is that fundamentally men love it. But Lester is telling it all from a particular point of view. When Lester's film is not (occasionally) straining to be funny, it is genuinely not funny—the kind of comedy at which one does not laugh, comedy that seems to take place in a cavern of ice where all the laughter has already been laughed, has been caught and frozen in glittering, frightening stalactites.

This is because Lester's film speaks from the very center of the Age of the Put-on. This is the heart of the sixties speaking about Dunkirk, Alamein, the murder of the Jews. No German officer would actually have said what Lester's German says about murdering Jews. (He is quite unperturbed—neither triumphant nor vicious nor tormented.) This film is the Mod generation's view of the war and of our mourning for it—a view of history not as tragedy but as stupidity. To them, we of an older generation who are still involved with such matters as this century's evil and guilt are simply entangled, in another way, in the same stupidity. And stupidity is funny; but this stupidity was so huge that it is deeper than ha-ha funny. The film's viewpoint is morally shocking, in the most serious sense, and is seriously debatable; but it is neither immoral nor amoral, and it is brilliantly, scathingly put. (p. 33)