A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, September 7, 2022

The Knack … and How to Get It (Richard Lester, 1965)

















 Cast: Rita Tushingham, Ray Brooks, Michael Crawford, Donal Donnelly. Screenplay: Richard Lester, based on a play by Ann Jellicoe. Cinematography: David Watkin. Art direction: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: Antony Gibbs. Music: John Barry. 

When I saw The Knack when it was first released, I was about the age of its principal characters, and I wondered why they were having so much more fun than I was. The obvious answer is that my life was not being directed by Richard Lester. But today, what seemed like a giddy delight of a movie, which so wowed the jury at Cannes that they gave it the Palme d’Or, feels a little tiresome and sad. It climaxes, after all, with Rita Tushingham’s character crying rape. And even though her cries, which are sometimes more like chirps, are played for laughs, we have learned to treat rape as no laughing matter, so a sourness has infected the movie that can’t be dismissed as misapplied “wokeness.” There are still things to like about The Knack: It does have a certain naïve charm and a great deal of energy, and the chorus of stuffy middle-class Brits commenting on the antics of the young is often funny. But the film is as dated as a farce about the flappers and flaming youth of the 1920s would have been to the “mods and rockers” of the mid-‘60s

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