Craig J. Clark
A cultural landmark like A Hard Day’s Night would be a tough act for anyone to follow, and director Richard Lester had to do it twice: First with a comedy about society’s changing attitudes towards sex, and then with the Beatles’ second film, which had a larger scope than its predecessor. Help! was bound to be a smash however it turned out – the legions of Beatlemaniacs around the globe would ensure that – but Lester had more riding on The Knack… and How to Get It when it was invited to Cannes in May of 1965. There it was in competition with such heavy hitters as William Wyler’s The Collector, Sidney Lumet’s The Hill, Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan, and Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’s The Shop on Main Street. All were awarded prizes by the jury, but the Palme d’Or was reserved for The Knack, which must have surprised Lester as much as anybody.
“It’s not like that. It’s an exaggeration. He has just got a certain success with the ladies. That’s all.”
Ann Jellicoe’s The Knack had been a hit in London’s West End in 1962, but Lester knew bringing it to the screen required more than simply “opening it up,” and worked closely with first-time screenwriter Charles Wood on the adaptation. (It would not be their last collaboration.) While certain dialogue exchanges were transferred intact, the whole structure was rethought, with one major change being introducing the unworldly Nancy (Rita Tushingham, a holdover from the stage production) in the opening minutes and following her around London as she searches for the YWCA. (In the play, she doesn’t appear until the end of act one.) This way, she gets to have her own misadventures and even engage in some of Lester’s trademark physical comedy before chancing upon sexually frustrated schoolteacher Colin (Michael Crawford) and his outgoing new lodger Tom (Donal Donnelly) while they’re picking up a bed at a junkyard.
The sequence of Colin, Tom, and Nancy wheeling the bed through London’s streets exemplifies The Knack’s free-spirited nature, with visual gags aplenty and a chorus of disapproving onlookers, whose voices are heard commenting on the action. (As Nancy steps off the bus, one remarks, “What her legs are walking her into.”) Lester’s film is chock full of camera tricks, quick cutting, and pratfalls, which Crawford carried off so well Lester kept inventing more for him. The only knack Colin has is for making a fool of himself, especially compared to his other tenant, smooth ladies’ man Tolen (Ray Brooks), whose conquests are enumerated in the guest book he has them sign.
Lester’s high-energy approach suits the material, hurtling from one comedic conceit to the next, but the handful of moments where he slows things down and lets scenes play with minimal cuts get at the heart of the matter. In one, shot in an uncomfortably close two-shot, Tolen goes to work on Nancy, putting his “women like to be dominated” ethos into action. Later, Nancy is the aggressor, setting her sights on a flattered Colin after Tolen has been thoroughly emasculated. (That this comes on the heels of his claim that “girls don’t get raped unless they want it” is especially gratifying.) In addition to the top prize at Cannes, The Knack captured the mood and tenor of its time, documenting the ripple effects on British culture the Beatles left in their wake.
“Lovely lads, and so natural. I mean, adoration hasn’t gone to their heads one jot. You know what I mean? Success.”
“Just so natural and still the same as they was before they was.”
With The Knack in the can, Lester went to work on Beatles Two (the placeholder title until something more suitable presented itself). Back for seconds was Charles Wood, who revised the original script by Marc Behm, previously credited with the story for Charade. Between them, they cooked up a preposterous plot about a bloodthirsty cult pursuing the Fab Four to the four corners of the Earth (or at the very least, the Austrian Alps and the Bahamas) because Ringo is wearing their sacred sacrificial ring and can’t get it off to save his life – literally. That this is a pretext to string together seven new Beatles numbers and sell soundtrack albums is to be expected, but the gaps between songs, each of which Lester finds creative ways to shoot with the aid of cinematographer David Watkin (another Knack veteran), are hardly occasions to simply mark time.
The bumbling villains, who frequently work at cross-purposes, are high priest Clang (Leo McKern) and his accident-prone right-hand man Bhuta (John Bluthal), and megalomaniacal scientist Professor Foot (Victor Spinetti) and his put-upon assistant Algernon (Roy Kinnear). Aiding the Beatles in their time of need are priestess Ahme (Eleanor Bron), the first character to break the fourth wall, and a Scotland Yard superintendent (Patrick Cargill) whose “protection” often proves ineffective. He also tees up George’s best line when he does an impression of Ringo, boasting he’s “a bit of a famous mimic in my own small way, you know. James Cagney.” Unimpressed by the superintendent’s Liverpudlian accent, George deadpans, “Not a bit like Cagney.”
As different as they seem on the surface, The Knack and Help! have a number of things in common, including the use of cheeky captions (“The Very Famous Plan”) and an almost avant-garde approach to plot advancement. The lyrical bed-moving scene in the former even finds its mate in the Alpine “Ticket to Ride” sequence in the latter, which not only serves as a proto-music video, but could very well be the inception point for The Monkees. Meanwhile, with other groups like Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Dave Clark Five, and Herman’s Hermits racing them to cinemas, a third team-up between the Beatles and Richard Lester never made it past the script stage. Playwright Joe Orton even took a crack at writing one, but one of his provocative notions – upping the ante on the four front doors that open onto one shared living space in Help! by writing a scene of the four Beatles sharing one bed – wasn’t going to fly no matter how “swinging” London got.
You can get “The Knack” on a few streaming services, but you may need “Help!” finding where to rent or purchase the Beatles’ film.
