Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15704 in DVD
• Released on: 2004-08-02
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Formats: Black & White, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 85 minutes

Synopsis
Tolen (Ray Brooks) has it. Colin (Michael Crawford) doesn't. "It" is the knack for getting women into bed. After obtaining lessons from the master, Colin buys a bed big enough for his conquests. This leads Colin and his friend Tom (Donal Donnelly) to Nancy (Rita Tushingham), an attractive innocent country girl. The boys vie for her affections, but when she meets Tolen, she faints, overcome by his charm. Nancy awakens thinking she has been raped and points her finger at the hapless Colin.
As films age they are commonly seen as "tame by today's standards." This is not the case with this outrageously loose 1965 portrait of Swinging London. A revolutionary film, this amoral slapstick combined the rapid-fire-gag approach used by director Richard Lester in his previous work with the Beatles (A HARD DAY'S NIGHT, HELP!) with the awareness of technique popularized by the French New Wave. The style of filmmaking perfectly captures the time period and was also highly influential to the film school generation of the late 1960s and early 1970s. John Barry's playful score fusing jazz and pop sets the frenetic pace. Though purely cinematic, the film is based on a popular play by Ann Jellicoe.

Customer Reviews

A SIXTIES Arty FACT
Forty years after its release, it's hard to imagine how new and fresh this film was. Borrowing heavily from the French New Wave in terms of look and feel, the film and its inseperable and sublime John Barry soundtrack are a fascinating snapshot of the so-called swinging sixties in London.

Whilst The Knack has some stunning elements all captured beautifully on the otherwise feature free DVD - the stark black and white photography, the white on white decor of the downstairs flat and the views of London (somehow familiar yet quite alien) the film is not what it was.

Perhaps it's original uniqueness has been copied or pastiched so many times that the film is now a cliche. Scenes of 'wacky' youth leaping around in the street is a bit cringe inducing, while the scenes where Tolen tries to enamour himself of Nancy and the "Rape" last act are downright disturbing.

For fans of the movie's director Dick Lester the Knack is closer to A Hard Day's Night than Help and like those films it has a cool soundtrack.

It's a shame that the DVD didn't have a bit more to offer - there isn't even a trailer - something the soundtrack included when issued as an enhanced CD

Ultimately The Knack is essential viewing for those interested in Sixties London and how young some of the actors look - (check out early performances from Jacqueline Bisset and one time John Barry squeeze Jane Birkin).

Shop around for it and get the best price!!

The sixties at its best
I don't understand why this film gets unfavourable reviews on Amazon. I didn't like it when I first saw it on TV in the seventies (I missed it at the cinema being under-age) but it has become one of my favourite films since. It has the greatest of John Barry's great film scores, superb black and white photography, Rita Tushingham at her best, wonderful shots of mod London, and it is very wittily filmed. It is based on a theatre play which has transferred to the screen perfectly and it is inspired by the French New Wave. It is witty and trendy 60s mod art, and so it must be good.

Lest we forget...
Just what it really was like in "The Swinging Sixties" rent this DVD and remember... what? How much fun it was to do really whacky things for the sake of it. How pretty all the dolly birds looked. How boring and bigoted the older generation were. How women were simply there as objects of desire. How chatting-up a girl and getting her into bed was the most important thing in a relationship. How sexual promiscuity was revered. How rape was nothing really important. How "things" had no value other than for fun. How smart cinema-photography, overt imagery and rapid-fire, meaningless dialogue could make a film really "important". And... how dull and pointless all of this could be.

Like a bad dream "The Knack" brings these memories flooding back and makes you really glad that you aren't there anymore. And... the really 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 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 cheekily "hip" comic romp.

Forty years on the only redeeming features it can lay claim to are the wholly unintentional - 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 the sixties that the passage of time has enshrined. Essential viewing, but for all the wrong reasons.