Richard Lester

Richard Lester is an American director who made his name in Britain, and he arrived with a style that looked like an accident and was nothing of the kind. A Hard Day's Night put the Beatles inside a fake documentary in 1964, cut it at a speed nobody else was cutting at, and produced a visual grammar the music video spent the next thirty years borrowing from. Help! turned the same band into a live-action cartoon, and The Knack ...and How to Get It applied the technique to a story with no pop stars in it at all. There is a Palme d'Or in his record.

His comedy is restless and slightly cruel. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum keeps interrupting its own songs. How I Won the War is an anti-war comedy that refuses to be funny at exactly the moments you expect it to be. The Bed Sitting Room plays post-nuclear absurdism with a completely straight face. Petulia, shot in San Francisco in 1968, is the outlier and possibly the best film he made, a fractured marriage drama with its chronology deliberately shuffled.

Then he became a reliable maker of large studio pictures. The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers were filmed as a single production and released as two features, which caused a famous contractual row and also produced the funniest swordplay in the genre. Robin and Marian is the melancholy one, about heroes who got old. He directed Superman II and Superman III, steering the series further towards farce with each, and went back to the Musketeers in 1989.