The Knack… and How to Get It (1965)

Comedy /
6.3/10
71% – Critics
69% – Audience

The Knack… and How to Get It Storyline

London schoolteacher Colin is self-conscious about his general inexperience with the opposite sex, unlike his roommate Tolen, who has a proverbial revolving door of beautiful young women in and out of his bedroom, and who cannot help Colin just by teaching him his approach with women. While Tolen wants to rent their third bedroom to his equally-womanizing friend Rory McBryde, the two who would be able to share their female conquests with Colin, someone unknown to them swoops in to rent the room: Tom, who seems more concerned about getting rid of its drab brownness–including Colin’s furniture in the furnished room–to a more pristine white. Evolving in thought, Colin ultimately comes to the belief that his lack of success with women is due to the small size of his bed, and he wants a six-foot bed like Rory’s. On their way back from the junkyard where Tom knew of such a bed with a wrought-iron frame, Colin and Tom literally pick up Nancy Jones, who has just arrived in town and was looking for the YWCA. Naive Nancy has a quick learning curve in her dealings in London with this collective: Tolen sees her as another conquest, while Colin thinks she can get him out of his rut. As this foursome wanders around London individually, in small groups, or as four, those they encounter act as a Greek chorus commenting on their goings-on.

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The Knack… and How to Get It Movie Reviews

fun sex comedy

Schoolteacher Colin (Michael Crawford) is sexless in swinging London. He is both annoyed and jealous of his neighbor Tolen (Ray Brooks), a playboy who has a parade of beautiful women marching into his apartment. It’s girls, girls, girls, everywhere girls. Nancy Jones (Rita Tushingham) is new to the city and learning her way.

This is light fun in the sex comedy space. Its editing and story telling is downright modern. The directing reminds me of Edgar Wright. It’s great to do both sides of the sexual revolution story by following Nancy on her journey. I would get rid of the third flat-mate. She should have been the third. The rape is a surprising turn with one hilarious line. It’s a fun look at 60’s London and its changing sexual culture.

this movie has the knack, but there’s a lot of dated stuff

In between “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!”, Richard Lester directed this look at swinging London. “The Knack …and How to Get It” has the same sort of humor as Lester’s collaborations with the Beatles (and even takes time to show the generation gap). Unfortunately, the depictions of gender relations are dated at best, and the last part of the movie turns rape into a joke. This will come across as especially inappropriate in an era when large numbers of women have exposed some notable men as sexual predators.

Aside from that, the movie is enjoyable. A fair amount of zany stuff and rapid-fire dialogue make it something that you’ll probably like watching, understanding that it’s very much a product of its time.

the bizarre, sometimes funny, awkward, experimental break in-between Lester’s Beatles movies

The Knack is a comedy that is wildly exuberant in its editing style, sort of like Lester came out of a marathon of Godard movies from the period but on a bunch of pop rocks or some other candy confection, and he and his editor Anthony Gibbs (who was more comfortable with the ‘Kitchen Sink’ type movies than something like Hard Days Night, just look at his credits to see his name attached to nearly all the major titles) decided to go wild. Sometimes this works for the sake of the energy and decidedly… uncertain, going-in-many-directions-not-settled nature of the main character Colin (Michael Crawford), and sometimes it doesn’t.

Where it doesn’t work for certain are the cut-always, almost in a strange, semi-satirical but documentary style where older people comment on these young people, whether it’s Crawford or Rita Tushingham’s character Nancy, who has only one real goal for the most part which is to find the YMCA in town, and they say things like “Mods and rockers” or “why in my day…” and things like that. I get what Lester was going for, that we have these outside perspectives almost as a commentary *on them*, but those little bits (sprinkled throughout the movie) are dated. Where the movie does still work is in creating a genuinely unsettling tone, and this creates a lot of moments of unexpected comedy – at times this is really a story about guys arguing over space in a flat and moving things around, bordering, if it were in lessor hands or those of today, like a sitcom, and then… it’s also a story of toxic masculinity as a part of it.

Another thing about looking at historical context – a year later, a version of the roommate/sorta-friend Tolen’s type would appear as the “anti-hero(ish)” persona of Michael Caine’s Alfie. But where Caine is an actor who can sort of make you feel if not much sympathy or empathy then at least some human understanding to his character (also, he’s the lead, so what can you do but go for the ride with him), Ray Brooks is positively slimy as this guy who is somehow going to show Colin how to “get the Knack”, which means how to get women. Somehow this is also communicated earlier, without much dialog needed, when Colin, as the school-teacher he is, for a moment gets distracted along with the other kids as they ogle at the girls outside (though he snaps out of it to try and be a disciplinarian… which he’s bad at).

But anyway, Brooks at first comes off seeming like the “cool” playboy type, or, more accurately (and I have to think Lester meant this as an intentional homage), Marcello Mastroianni out of 8 1/2 or La Dolce Vita (he even at one point does what seems like a “mock” whipping when Colin is playing around with Nancy… and then it doesn’t seem like playing around anymore). Yet there’s another level of commentary going on here; a version of this kind of movie could feasibly even show up many years after this as like, say, a college comedy or even a romantic comedy (an edgier one, but still). Watch as Brooks corners Tushingham in that room – his body language, his demeanor (does he *ever* genuinely smile, is the actor’s question and choice he goes for, and its effective), it all leads to the question of being a sexual predator; how he got the “birds” he’s had before one may question by this point – did he always have “the Knack”, or did some of these girls not care so much if he had the hair or suit or Marcello glasses of whatever?

The point is, this leads to the last stretch of the movie, which becomes… kind of a very odd joke about rape. Of course Nancy isn’t really raped, not in the way we think as technically speaking…. but isn’t it all the same the kind of ‘rape’ or sexual assault and language that has made things as of late in this country so f***ed up? It was impossible not to think about that, and yet Lester finds… humor in this(?)

I think the key is that he goes all out about it – she wakes up after fainting from being so provoked (and yes, there *is* that element, let’s not ever leave Tolen off the hook here, creep he is), and then proceeds to say ‘RAPE!’ over and over again (in one belly-laugh moment she goes up to a random house, knocks, the person answers, Rita says ‘rape’, and the old woman at the door says dead-pan, ‘no thanks.’). It’s not the rape that is funny, but the public’s reactions to it, how it IS a chaotic and horrible thing in reality, but if it didn’t actually happen… well, can it still be funny? I wonder what most people coming to this fresh would think about how Lester treats this material and these characters.

It’s a strange combination since it’s a light-hearted affair – the highlight of the film involves when Colin and Tom, the other (new) roommate, first meet Nancy while they’re collecting a bed frame, and have to move it themselves, on foot, across the city, and this scored to a jubilant, jazzy, wonderful and even happy kind of music by John Barry – but it deals in real hurt and pain that is caused by men who won’t take bloody no for an answer. It’s not something Lester is out to solve (I have no idea how it was in the play this was based on), however he does find a cinematic grammar that breaks apart how a mind thinks in moments that rattle the consciousness or when one’s mind wanders and so on. It’s a brash experiment that doesn’t hold up as well as Lester’s Beatles films, but it’s fun and original while it lasts, which is at a fairly brisk 82 minutes.

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