The Knack ... and How to Get It (Woodfall Films, Lopert Pictures, United Artists, 1965)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Anatomy of Pop I shifted to Turner Classic Movies for the last two films in their three-film tribute to American-born but British-based director Richard Lester. They began with what’s probably Lester’s most successful and best-known film, A Hard Day’s Night, and then showed its fascinating precursor, It’s Trad, Dad! That was a film I caught years ago on TCM and have been in love with ever since for its sheer cheekiness and willingness to break the boundaries of what was considered acceptable in a pop musical. I’ve written a great deal about this movie on my moviemagg blog before (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2011/07/its-trad-dad-aka-ring-ding-rhythm.html), and I’ll add little about it now except that Felix Felton, the actor they cast as the villain -- a small-town mayor who launches a campaign against both rock and “trad” (short for “traditional,” it was the British term for Dixieland jazz) music in town -- looked amazingly (and probably deliberately) like Winston Churchill. Unfortunately, It’s Trad, Dad! (released in the U.S. as Ring-a-Ding Rhythm because the term “trad” meant nothing to American audiences) isn’t the film we’re talking about here.

The third film in TCM’s Lester tribute, and the only one I hadn’t seen before (I may have seen it at the old San Diego Public Library, but if I did I’ve repressed it), was The Knack … and How to Get It, made in 1965 and the film Lester made between his two with the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night and Help! It’s also a relentlessly sexist piece -- the titular “knack” is the ability to pick up and seduce women, and it’s so horribly sexist it’s hard to believe that while the screenplay was by a man (Charles Wood), the original source was a play by a woman (Ann Jellicoe). It’s all about -- stop me if you’ve heard this before -- two roommates, the knackless Colin (a young and very twinkie-ish Michael Crawford, who turned in a lot of lame performances in juvenile leads in the 1960’s, fell from sight and then made a stunning comeback as the stage star of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical The Phantom of the Opera in the 1980’s) and the knack-ridden Tolen (Ray Brooks, who by the way pronounces the “t” in “often” early on in the film but later drops it), along with Colin’s friend Tom (Donal Donnelly) -- who I think we’re supposed to believe is Gay even though Tolen flat-out asks him, “Are you a homosexual?,” and he says no. At the beginning of the film Colin is getting really tired both of his own sexual frustration and at Tolen’s insistence on locking him out of the apartment so Tolen can be alone with his latest conquest. Colin is considering throwing Tolen out but wonders what sort of person he should look for to replace him.

Simultaneously a young woman from somewhere else in England (I think the synopsis said Liverpool but she seems more like a country girl than someone from the country’s second largest city) named Nancy Jones (Rita Tushingham) arrives in London and is planning to stay at the YWCA -- only she can’t find it. Lester, Wood and Jellicoe take their own sweet time bringing Nancy together with the three male principals, but eventually they do and, as you’d expect if you’ve seen more than three previous movies in your life before, she ends up pairing up with knackless Colin rather than dick-driven Tolen. Lester and Wood dress up this simple and way overused plot with plenty of plot devices, including the sorts of written titles telling us about the characters Lester used effectively in It’s Trad, Dad! and less effectively (but still better than here!) in Help! as well as gag sequences showing Lester’s love of silent comedy and choruses (in the Greek drama sense) commenting on the action. Lester frequently gives us people on the street commenting on the action -- mostly middle-aged types complaining about the loose morals of British youth and the schoolchildren of Colin’s class (he’s a grade-school teacher) repeating bits of the principals’ dialogue as if they have learned it by rote in his classroom.

The Knack has much the same period attitude towards sex as the then-popular book How to Pick Up Girls -- the idea seems to be that women basically don’t want sex and have to be tricked into saying yes,but once they do they’ll be happy they let you dominate them (“Dominate!” is one of the pieces of advice Tolen gives Colin) and you can enjoy them as long as you like until you get tired of one and pick up another one. It’s the kind of “pick-up culture” that regrettably has made a comeback in the 2000’s and led to a movement of self-described “incels” (short for “involuntarily celibate”), men who can’t win the pickup game and get insanely angry and jealous over the men who can and the women they “score.” The idea that men and women can form mutually satisfying and truly equal relationships that work both inside and outside the bedroom seems to have no place in the world of films like this. About the only entertaining parts of The Knack are the comic set-pieces -- Rita Tushingham’s wrestle with the sorts of temporary lockers in bus stations in which you can store your bags, in which one locker door opens when she tries to open another, and finally both the lockers she tried to use close when someone else uses the cigarette machine next door (the ubiquity of cigarettes and the sheer thoughtlessness with which people light up in locations no one’s allowed to smoke in today really dates this film), and the attempts of Colin and Tom to move the double bed they’ve just bought at a junkyard (without a mattress, which would make it pretty useless) across town and into Colin’s tiny apartment (in which he’s previously had only a cot-style single bed, hardly sufficient even if he does get lucky).

Towards the end there’s a scene in a park in which Tolen fondles Nancy’s breasts while she’s standing and she immediately collapses, and when she gets up she immediately accuses Tolen, Colin and Tom of raping her. It’s not clear whether she really thinks what Tolen did to her constitutes rape or whether she’s just too naive to know what the word means, but after over two decades of watching Law and Order: Special Victims Unit I have a low tolerance for stories in which a woman makes false accusations of rape which in the real world just trivialize the whole issue and make it much harder (and it’s way too hard to begin with; rape is apparently the most rarely reported of all the major felonies) for women who are genuinely raped to be believed. The Knack might have been a better movie if Rita Tushingham had played a stronger, more self-directed character and if there’d been more of a sense of comeuppance for Tolen at the end -- either that or Colin realizing he’s Gay and pairing off with Tom! There’s also a grim irony in the unseen character of Rory McBride, supposedly a friend of Tolen’s who has an even bigger case of the Knack than Tolen does -- and who’s holding a public event at the Albert Hall on December 8 that will feature all his girlfriends. (We get a Fellini-esque fantasy scene of this actually happening.) The irony is that December 8, 1980 was the date John Lennon, who starred in three of Lester’s movies (the two you know about plus How I Won the War, which also featured Michael Crawford), was shot and killed in New York City.