Year: 1965
Country: United Kingdom
Director: Richard Lester
Cast: Rita Tushingham, Ray Brooks, Michael Crawford, Donal Donnelly
IMBD: Link
Language : English
Subtitles : English, Chinese, Italian
In March of 2015, The Knack…and How To Get It screened in Nimes, France for their British Screen Festival. During the introduction, director Richard Lester spoke on the experience of making the film, saying his previous movie (A Hard Day’s Night) was essentially “about four people who communicated without speaking and [The Knack was] about four people who speak without communicating. The original stage play was very much more, as we say, fascist versus liberal, it was a more political piece. In my usual fashion of ruining a good play or a good book, I quickly tried to turn the fascist into a figure of pity and scorn. So the strongest character quickly became the weakest.”
The Knack…and How To Get It is a difficult piece for many to engage in, even if it is a comedy. But that is one of the reasons it remains such a fascinating work. This swingin’ London-drenched film is funny and whimsical in the manner of Help! or A Hard Day’s Night, while also quilting the intellectual and emotional power struggles of the youth and working class, a familiar tool of British New Wave cinema. If that weren’t enough, woven into the verbiage, visuals and characters of the film are discussions of sexual freedom, women’s liberation and male domination, all highly topical in 1964.
The vast majority of the British New Wave was nicknamed “angry young men” films or “Kitchen Sink films” (mostly due to the kind of social realism that it utilized). One might’ve assumed that this adaptation of Ann Jellicoe’s play would have followed those New Wave rules a little more closely but that was entirely not Lester’s style. Instead, his film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 with its conflux of surrealism, intergenerational commentary and sexual/linguistic anarchism.
The Knack… was one of two films adapted from women-written plays at the time, the other being Sheleigh Delaney’s Taste of Honey. Both played strong parts in the British New Wave and were considered to be groundbreaking in their own ways.
This may sound like a quite serious film and in many ways, the subjects being tackled are quite serious: rape, harassment, “being cool,” toxic masculinity, nerd shaming, you name it. But let us not forget that this is, above all, a Richard Lester film. While we may continue to dissect the intricate verbiage and myriad of narrative interactions between characters for years to come, the film itself is utterly entertaining. And that cannot be discounted. The levity within tenseness is welcome.
As The Knack…was being shot, Lester details the camera set up that they used for the outdoors work. A number of different tents were set up to hide second or third cameras and used to film normal people on the streets of London who were watching the crew film. “As you can imagine,” Lester grimaces, “[most of the time] they were disgusted. So we took those bits of film, natural people responding to us, and added comment and voices over for post-production, and it became the style of the film.”
This spontaneity, youth critique and class-consciousness emphasizes the role that The Knack…and How To Get it played in British New Wave cinema. Ann Jellicoe may not have liked the adaptation of her play but the film certainly transmogrified the original material into something else entirely; a critical piece of British Film history and a work that, in modern context, allows us to investigate the meaning of language, actions, image concepts and the relationship of masculinity to sexuality. (Ariel Schudson)
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Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2024 20:30:41 +0200
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Track nr. 3: audio (A_AAC) [Commentary with film critic Neil Sinyard] {eng}
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Chapters:
00:00:00,000-00:11:47,624: Chapter 1 {eng}
00:11:47,624-00:21:58,400: Chapter 2 {eng}
00:21:58,400-00:31:33,100: Chapter 3 {eng}
00:31:33,100-00:40:32,972: Chapter 4 {eng}
00:40:32,972-00:53:15,275: Chapter 5 {eng}
00:53:15,275-01:05:52,323: Chapter 6 {eng}
01:05:52,323-01:18:49,934: Chapter 7 {eng}
01:18:49,934-01:25:10,063: Chapter 8 {eng}
This report was created by AVInaptic (01-11-2020) on 19-10-2024 02:01:19
