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Customer Reviews of The Knack... and How to Get It

Most of the fizz is flat
Forty years on the once scintillating British comedies of Richard Lester have lost a lot of their fizz. Even "A Hard Day's Night," though buoyed by the Beatles and their tunes, seems a little tired and old-fashioned. "The Knack," which Lester did a few years later, uses the same tricks: madcap antics, irreverent humor, verbal nonsense (that somewhat foreshadows Monty Python), quick-cut editing, cute locations and such. Though based on a play, the film is long on style and attitude and short on plot. Nerd (Michael Crawford) envies a stud (Ray Brooks) with a "knack" with the ladies. Along comes Nancy (Rita Tushingham), a sort of everywoman, and the tussle for her begins. Oh, and there's daft painter about, a sort of revisitation of Gulley Jimpson, adding to the chaos. The picture captures the mood of mod '60s London pretty well, and David Watkin's black and white photography and Lester's visuals are striking. And to top it off, there's John Barry's rather famous score for organ and jazz orchestra, probably one of his best. Most of the fizz that's left is there.

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The score is very good
This movie is of its time and has not aged well. It's a not very vivid portrayal of the swinging sixties in London, with four uninvolving characters spewing bizarre non-sequiturs at one another. Watch it with the subtitles off and you'll think it doesn't make sense; watch it with the subtitles on and you'll realize it's not supposed to make sense. In neither case is it at all funny. The film also betrays its origins as a play; despite the best efforts of the director to open it up - he spends about five wordless minutes showing three of the characters rolling a brass bed through London - it feels stagebound. <
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>What's good about it is the John Barry score. The first dreamlike scene in which the music spirals around and around a bevy of beautiful girls is worth seeing. I also enjoyed the random comments of the disapproving older English observing the wacky doings of the the "mods" and the "rockers," though only one of the characters is a mod; none are rockers. Most importantly, none are interesting. <
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>Avoid the movie; buy the soundtrack. If you want a vivid movie portrayal of London in the 1960's watch Michael Caine's "Alfie".

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Lest we forget...
... just what it really was like in "The Swinging Sixties" watch this DVD and remember... what? How much fun it was to do really whacky things just for the sake of it. How boring, bigoted and irrelevant the older generation were. How vacuously pretty all the dolly birds looked. How they were simply there as male objects of desire. How chatting them up and getting them into bed as quickly as possible was what relationships were all about. How sexual promiscuity was revered. How rape was actually a bit of a "joke". How snappy cinema-photography, a cool soundtrack and rapid-fire, meaningless dialogue could make a film really "good". And... how dull and pointless all of this could be. <
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>Like a bad dream "The Knack" brings these memories flooding back and makes you really glad that you aren't there anymore. And the scary thing about it all is that it really was like that, so much so that the film, the truly awful world it portrays and the pathetic, soul-less people who populate it were seen, at the time, not as some kind of dark satire (which it wasn't intended to be) but as part of a highly successful, cheekily "hip" comic romp. Hey, you too can hitch-up with some really nutty guys, paint your flat white, get a bigger bed, and then have sex with as many innocent girls as possible. No responsibilities, no emotions, no worries... just lots of fun. Really? <
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>Forty years on the only redeeming features it can lay claim to are the wholly unintentional - the people & situations it portrays are now so alien and even unacceptable (particularly its bizarre and disturbing treatment of "rape for laughs") that it actually holds your attention in a perverse, gob-smackingly "can this really have been considered an important film" kind of way, its numerous shots of London and its streets, shop-fronts, thick winter coats & cars make it an intriguing "timepiece", and... it's the perfect antidote to all the hype & nostalgia about England in the sixties that the passage of time has enshrined. Essential viewing, but for all the wrong reasons. <
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