The Knack… and How to Get It

I’m not sure if it’s the material or the hyperkinetic direction, but something about The Knack… and How to Get It just feels off from the first frame until the last. It’s a microcosm of the Swinging Sixties and the sexual anxieties on display throughout, best exemplified by Michael Crawford’s anxious schoolteacher and Rita Tushingham’s frigid virgin. There’s also an unnecessary device of an older British generation scolding the younger one through voiceover and documentary style footage of them looking disproving on the street.

The manic editing and freewheeling attitude Richard Lester brought to the Beatles and A Hard Day’s Night is here again, but that spirit is too overpowering. The Beatles taking the piss out of themselves and deploying proto-music videos is one thing, but a juvenile psychosexual comedy (I guess?) is an entirely different beast. The balancing act between comedy and neurosis is perpetually in flux as the scales keep tilting too far either way before we finally reach the final scene, which was patently obvious from Crawford and Tushingham’s first meet cute.

The whole thing adds up to a lot of style in search of a point. If there’s such a thing as “too much” or “fussily overdirected,” and there is if the tone and artistic choices feel routinely at combative odds with the material, then The Knack is a prime example of this phenomena. It’s more of a cinematic curio of a generation struggling to define itself and developing its own identity in real time.