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The Knack ...and How to Get It

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The Knack …and How to Get It
Theatrical poster
Directed byRichard Lester
Written byCharles Wood
Produced byOscar Lewenstein
StarringRita Tushingham
Ray Brooks
Michael Crawford
Donal Donnelly
CinematographyDavid Watkin
Edited byAntony Gibbs
Music byJohn Barry
Production
company
Distributed byUnited Artists Corporation
Release date
3 June 1965 (1965-06-03)
Running time
85 minutes
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Budget$364,000[1][2]
Box office$2.5 million (US)[1]

The Knack …and How to Get It is a 1965 British comedy film directed by Richard Lester and based on the play by Ann Jellicoe. It won the Palme d'Or at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival and the Grand Prix of the Belgian Film Critics Association. It was also in competition for the Golden Bear at the 15th Berlin International Film Festival.

The Knack

The "knack" is the skill, and particularly the special skill to do a certain task, i.e. "he's got the knack". The phrase was particularly popular in the 1960s. It does not pertain exclusively (or even particularly) to sexual skills.

Plot

Colin (Michael Crawford) is a nervous schoolteacher working in London, observing rather than participating in the sexual revolution of the 1960s. He has little personal sexual experience and wishes to gain "the knack": in this case to successfully seduce women. He turns to a friend, a confident, womanizing drummer known only by his surname, Tolen. Tolen gives him unhelpful advice to consume more protein and use intuition, acknowledging intuition is not something that can be completely learned, and advocates the importance of domination of women. He (Tolen) then suggests that one of his mates "Rory McBride" should take up the spare-room that Colin is looking to rent, (as Colin owns the home), where Colin can "share" the women of both Tolen and Rory.

Colin boards the front door shut. The third flatmate, Tom, is obsessed with painting everything white... including the windowpanes. Due to the blocked door Tolen brings his girls in through the window. Colin swaps his single bed for a fancy old double wrought iron bed which he finds in a scrapyard with Tom. Nancy (Rita Tushingham) meets Colin at the scrapyard and they have a moment of connection when their eyes meet. Nancy is an inexperienced and shy young woman, one can say Colin's female counterpart; who has arrived to London from out of town and is searching for the YWCA. She stops by a clothing store and is won over by the flattery of the clerk, until she overhears him repeating the same words to every female customer.

From the scrapyard the three take the bed on a complex and zany journey back to the house. This includes parking it at a parking meter so they can eat their lunch before moving it on a car transporter and carrying it down the steps of the Royal Albert Hall. Back at the house, Nancy tries to help Colin and Tom maneuver the new "vast" bed up to Colin's bedroom but are having trouble because when Tom let the spare room, he moved all the furniture out into the main hall and left it all there. Tolen arrives back home to find the new flat-mate Tom and sees the new girl who clearly must be preyed upon since that is what having "The Knack" is all about, without realizing or caring, that Colin already likes her but as usual is shy. Tolen immediately puts the moves on new Nancy after Tom has used a game of "How to train a Lion" after a dust-up trying to move the new bed upstairs. Tolen gets aggressive with her trying to "teach" Colin how to get the Knack, but see what is really "going on" and as the camera zooms in for a close-up on Colin's eyes, the audience can see he is already feeling very protective of her. Nancy resists Tolen for a little while and even runs away frightened after he kisses her. When she returns, Tolen begins to fain an apology although she isn't aware that his placating her is all part of his "Knack" for winning girls to him. Eventually, she is won over and she leaves the house with him on his motorcycle and Tom urges Colin to go after to make sure she's all right. An iconic shot of Colin and Tom up on the top of an alleyway comes now as Tolen is chasing them both on his motorcycle before taking he and Nancy to a public park. She loses her hat during the pursuit and Colin scoops it up off the road to bring it back to her when they catch up.

In a public space, Tolen appears to sexually assaults Nancy, who at first is silent, then faints. When she wakes up, she begins claiming she was raped, but this was not the case. Tolen, Colin and Tom find themselves unable to restrain her from loudly repeating the allegations all over the neighborhood, or puncturing the tires of Tolen's motorcycle; after which she runs back to the residence, where she throws Tolen's records out of the window and strips naked inside his bedroom. The men become convinced her rape allegations reflect her own rape fantasy and urge Tolen to "go on to it since HE has The Knack. When Nancy emerges from the room wearing only her overcoat, she persists in her rape fantasy but shifts her focus from Tolen to Colin. With her new found power to frighten the men instead of herself being scared, she backs Colin and the other men back down the stairs and corners Colin in the kitchen where she says that "no girl would ever suspect LUST beneath the handsome exterior of the tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed school-teacher lurks the heart of a beast lusting for the blood of young virgins." Colin looks shocked to know a girl thinks HE is handsome and she goes further to proclaim how lovely his hands are. He blushes when he asks her "Do I really?" Tom and Tolen then come down to the kitchen and see how Colin and Nancy are gazing at each other and Tom says that Colin has raped her. Shocked at the very idea, Tolen protests, and then Nancy states that "rugged and handsome with lovely hands" Colin did indeed rape her "marvelous-super" and the more she extolls Colin's own "Knack," the taller he stands proud to have the affection of just this one young woman, even with a ridiculous claim that she manages to make quite sweetly with her new affections for Colin. Tolen gets confused by all this and his expressions begin to indicate that perhaps his own mojo maintaining "the Knack" is slipping after hearing Nancy speak of Colin in this manner.

Tolen slips off to his engagement where he and Rory have booked the Royal Albert Hall in order to have a reunion with all the girlfriends of both men. When he arrives, Tolen discovers that all HIS girls have turned their affections to Rory. (The audience never sees Rory.) The ladies refuse to allow him inside and trample him underfoot. He arrives back home and asks Tom where Colin and Nancy are, both upstairs in his room sitting on his "vast" new bed. The two are still whispering new sweet-nothings to each other with Colin smoking a cigarette and his tie missing, collar now standing up straight, as if he and Nancy really had been physically intimate already but there is no indication of that. Colin says "It would be lovely to see you laugh" with a hand on her cheek.

The film ends with Tolen having totally lost The Knack, and with Nancy and Colin having an evening stroll hand in hand down, perfectly comfortable with each other, with Colin having acquired his own different kind of Knack.

Cast

Production

After seeing Ann Jellicoe's play The Knack, the producers envisioned a film adaptation. They offered the position of director to Lindsay Anderson, who refused.[3]

Having worked with The Beatles on A Hard Day's Night, Lester was another candidate for director, and agreed to take the position.[3] Lester made major changes to the play, adding his own touch through direct address, unexpected oddly-edited sequences, humorous subtitles, and a Greek chorus of disapproving members of "the older generation."[citation needed] Filming took place in a few weeks in November and early December 1964, and Lester employed television advertising techniques.[3] Talking about the film in the 1980s, actor Ray Brooks said:

He’s a very visual man...They reckon that you could take any frame from Help, The Knack, and A Hard Day’s Night and you could put it on the cover of Time/Life. Everything was so beautifully shot."[4]

Lester himself makes a brief cameo as an annoyed bystander. John Barry contributed the jazzy score, which features a memorable organ solo by Alan Haven. Jane Birkin, Charlotte Rampling, and Jacqueline Bisset all made their first cinematic appearances in the film as extras, together with Top of the Pops disc girl Samantha Juste.

Reception

In The New York Times, Bosley Crowther positively reviewed it as "delightfully mobile" and a "frenziedly running, jumping picture".[5] Variety praised the performances, citing Rita Tushingham as perfect in her role.[6]

In 2016, The Hollywood Reporter ranked it the 49th best film to win the Palme d'Or, stating it "hasn't aged well" but the setting was a great asset.[7] In 2001, the Wallflower Critical Guide noted the creativity in cinematography and editing, but said it disrupted the storytelling.[8]

Accolades

The film was entered into competition at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival,[9] where it won the Palme d'Or.[10]

Award Date of ceremony Category Recipient(s) Result Ref(s)
Belgian Film Critics Association 1966 Grand Prix Richard Lester Won [11]
British Academy Film Awards 1966 Best British Film Nominated [12]
Best Film from Any Source Nominated
Best Screenplay Charles Wood Nominated
Best Actress Rita Tushingham Nominated
Best Cinematography, Black and White David Watkin Nominated
Most Promising Newcomer Michael Crawford Nominated
Cannes Film Festival 3 – 16 May 1965 Palme d'Or Richard Lester Won [10]
Golden Globe Awards 28 February 1966 Best Actress – Comedy or Musical Rita Tushingham Nominated [13]
Best Foreign Film, English Language Richard Lester Nominated
Writers' Guild of Great Britain 10 March 1966 Best British Documentary Film or Short Script Charles Wood Won [14]

References

  1. ^ a b Michael Deeley, Blade Runners, Deer Hunters and Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: My Life in Cult Movies, Pegasus Books, 2009 p 31
  2. ^ Tino Balio, United Artists: The Company That Changed the Film Industry, University of Wisconsin Press, 1987 p. 245
  3. ^ a b c Steiner, Richard. "The Knack ...and How to Get It". Turner Classic Movies. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
  4. ^ Ray Brooks interview by Chris Hunt
  5. ^ Crowther, Bosley (30 June 1965). "Screen: 'The Knack' Opens at Plaza:Director Gives Pace to Off-Beat Story". The New York Times. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
  6. ^ Staff (31 December 1964). "Review: 'The Knack … And How to Get It'". Variety. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
  7. ^ Staff (10 May 2016). "Cannes: All the Palme d'Or Winners, Ranked". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
  8. ^ Yoram Allon; Del Cullen; Hannah Patterson, eds. (2001). Contemporary British and Irish Film Directors: A Wallflower Critical Guide. Wallflower Press. p. 199. ISBN 1903364213.
  9. ^ "Festival de Cannes: The Knack …and How to Get It". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
  10. ^ a b "Cannes 2011: all the Palme d'Or winners". The Guardian. May 2011. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
  11. ^ "Richard Lester, The Knack". Cinémathèque royale de Belgique. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
  12. ^ "Film in 1966". British Academy of Film and Television Arts. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
  13. ^ "The Knack". Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
  14. ^ "Writers' Guild Awards 1965". Writers' Guild of Great Britain. Retrieved 7 June 2017.
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