Lester's career began with a Peter Sellers....
Lester's career began with a Peter Sellers collaboration, the short "The Running, Jumping, and Standing Still Film" (1959). He reached major prominence with the Beatles movies, "A Hard Day's Night" (1964) and "Help!" (1965), chronicling the fictional adventures of the pop group in appropriately zany, exuberant style. "The Knack . . . and How To Get It" (1965), from the popular play by Ann Jellicoe, with Michael Crawford and Rita Tushingham, assured his reputation, not only as the chief chronicler of "swinging London" in the 60s, but also as a film stylist whose work has had a profound effect on contemporary film language. Even more than his New Wave contemporaries, Lester freed the camera to join the action, and freed filmmakers from conventions that had become tired and restrictive by that time.
While poorly received at the time, "A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum" (1966), from the rambunctious musical by Stephen Sondheim and starring a gallery of classic "farceurs" from Zero Mostel to Buster Keaton, remains a classic translation of a rich stage musical--one of few that try to match the moviemaking to the music.
After attempting to apply the same freewheeling style to a more ambitious antiwar subject in "How I Won the War" (1967), Lester returned to America for "Petulia" (1968), an essay on life in these United States set against the background of the Vietnam war, which quickly became a connoisseur's favorite. The story of the breakdown of a marriage set in the hills of San Francisco captured the uneasiness of the times with a haunting metaphor. Back in London, Lester turned to apocalyptic farce with "The Bed-Sitting Room" (1969), a post-nuclear-war idyll which went straight over the heads of audiences the world over who had not yet discovered "Monty Python-s Flying Circus" and couldn't remember "The Goon Show."
Lester sat out the next four years, busying himself with witty TV commercials. When he returned to the big screen with "The Three Musketeers" in 1973, the 60s were long past. His subsequent films, mainly big-budget serial blockbuster productions, have been witty but far more mainstream. But then, so have the times. The Richard Lester of the 60s remains one of the most influential filmmakers of the last 30 years as the anarchic techniques he pioneered have become staples of the contemporary pop video lexicon.