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

The Ritz (Richard Lester, 1976)

The Ritz (Richard Lester, 1976)

Cast: Jack Weston, Rita Moreno, Jerry Stiller, Kaye Ballard, F. Murray Abraham, Paul B. Price, Treat Williams. Screenplay: Terrence McNally, based on his play. Cinematography: Paul Wilson. Production design: Philip Harrison. Film editing: John Bloom. Music: Ken Thorne.

The Ritz is not as funny as it wants to be -- or at least as I wanted it to be. Richard Lester sets the wrong pace for the action: uninterruptedly chaotic. Farce needs discipline and precise timing, but Lester lets everything devolve into a haphazard jumble of situations, one -- the identity switch between the brothers-in-law played by Jack Weston and Jerry Stiller -- intruding on another -- characters with elaborate fixations, like Paul B. Price's manic "chubby chaser." Noise drowns out many of Terrence McNally's best lines, though Rita Moreno and F. Murray Abraham in particular still manage to get a few good laughs with them. Unfortunately, time has also cast a pall over the anything-goes sexuality that takes place in the film's setting, a post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS gay bathhouse, which makes The Ritz very much a period piece.

The Bed Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969)

Dudley Moore and Peter Cook in The Bed Sitting Room

Cast: Rita Tushingham, Michael Hordern, Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe, Mona Washbourne, Richard Warwick, Marty Feldman, Harry Secombe, Roy Kinnear, Spike Milligan, Ronald Fraser, Jimmy Edwards, Frank Thornton, Dandy Nichols. Screenplay: John Antrobus, Charles Wood, based on a play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. Cinematography: David Watkin. Production design: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: John Victor Smith. Music: Ken Thorne.

Seemingly every comic actor in 1960s Britain turns up somewhere in Richard Lester's The Bed Sitting Room, but they don't generate many laughs. The problem with most absurdist comedies is the absence of a grounding normality, and in the post-apocalyptic setting of the film, in which Britain has been turned into a vast trash dump by a nuclear war, there's not much to serve as a norm against which its silliness can play out. The point is to satirize our pre-apocalyptic complacency, and once you get that point the film mostly asks you to sit around and wait for your particular favorite actor to make his or her appearance. Oh, there's Ralph Richardson. Ah, that's Mona Washbourne. Good, that's Marty Feldman. And so on for 90 minutes. It only seems longer.

A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester, 1964)

Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, John Lennon in A Hard Day's Night

John: John Lennon
Paul: Paul McCartney
George: George Harrison
Ringo: Ringo Starr
Grandfather: Wilfred Brambell
Norm: Norman Rossington
Shake: John Junkin
TV Director: Victor Spinetti
Millie: Anna Quayle
Police Inspector: Deryck Guyler
Man on Train: Richard Vernon
Simon Marshall: Kenneth Haigh

Director: Richard Lester
Screenplay: Alun Owen
Cinematography: Gilbert Taylor
Film editor: John Jympson
Musical director: George Martin

I am the same age as Ringo Starr and was born only a little over a week before John Lennon, so I watch A Hard Day's Night with more than ordinary nostalgia, the kind that might make me say with Wordsworth, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!" except that I'd be lying. Still, if there was bliss to be had in that post-Kennedy-assassination, Goldwater-haunted, Cold War summer of '64, it was to be found in watching John, Paul, George, and Ringo larking about at the movies. It was a breath of optimism, a statement that youth could conquer the world. It didn't quite turn out that way, but it didn't for Wordsworth either: He was talking about the French Revolution, which proved not to be so heavenly. This is, of course, one of the great film musicals, packed with engaging songs. They may be more lightweight than the Beatles' later oeuvre, lifting the heart rather than stirring the imagination, but they're impossible to resist. It also slyly, cheekily makes its point about the generation the Beatles are trying to leave behind: the ineptly bullying managers, the fussy TV director, the marketing executive sure that he has a handle on What the Kids Want, the Blimpish man on the train who tells Ringo, "I fought the war for your sort." Ringo's reply: "I bet you're sorry you won." Celebrity is closing in on them, epitomized by the wonderfully elliptical dialogue in John's encounter with a woman who is sure that she recognizes him but then puts on her glasses and proclaims, "You don't look like him at all." John mutters, "She looks more like him than I do." Alun Owen's screenplay, written after hanging out with the Beatles, absorbing and borrowing their own jokes, was one of the two Oscar nominations the film received, along with George Martin's scoring. None of the songs, of course, were nominated. Neither were Richard Lester's direction, Gilbert Taylor's cinematography, or John Jympson's editing, all of which kept the film buoyant and fleet.