According to legend, How I Won the War revealed John to be a natural screen actor. With the increasingly successful Richard Lester for a mentor—so the story goes—he could easily have crossed over from music to a busy film career, like Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley before him. He failed to do so because, at the last, he found it not challenging enough and, more pertinently, realized a film star’s life could be even more confining than that of a Beatle.
