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

Girl With Green Eyes (Desmond Davis, 1964)

Rita Tushingham and Peter Finch in Girl With Green Eyes

Cast: Rita Tushingham, Peter Finch, Lynn Redgrave, Marie Keen, Arthur O'Sullivan, Julian Glover, T.P. McKenna, Liselotte Goettinger, Pat Laffan, Eileen Crowe, May Craig, Joe Lynch, Yolande Turner, Harry Brogan, Michael C. Hennessy, Joseph O'Donnell, Michael O'Brien, David Kelly. Screenplay: Edna O'Brien, based on her novel. Cinematography: Manny Wynn. Art direction: Edward Marshall. Film editing: Brian Smedley-Aston, Antony Gibbs. Music: John Addison.

Rita Tushingham had a brief period as a movie star after a striking debut in Tony Richardson's A Taste of Honey in 1961. For a time she was the embodiment of British young womanhood, with an appeal that suggested a more homely, down-to-earth Audrey Hepburn. Girl With Green Eyes, her fourth feature, captures her at her best. She plays Kate Brady, a bright young Dublin shop-girl, raised on an Irish farm and educated in a convent school, who finds herself out of her depth when she gets involved with Eugene Gaillard, a much older intellectual, married but on the brink of divorce, played by Peter Finch. He's taken with her girlish frankness, she with his maturity and wealth of the kind of experience she has only read about in books. Yet a clash of cultures is inevitable: She's still clinging to her Roman Catholic upbringing, attending Mass every week, and although he prides himself on being a kind of lone wolf, a writer and translator who lives alone in his large house on the outskirts of Dublin, he's still tied to a coterie of cynical sophisticates. It can't work, and it doesn't, especially when her family learns that she's sleeping with an older man who is about to commit the mortal sin of divorce. At the end, she sets sail for London with her boisterous friend Baba (Lynn Redgrave) and a life more in keeping with her age and experience. It's a coming-of-age movie, and a pretty good one, with fine performances all round, solidly directed by Desmond Davis -- it was his first film as a director after working as camera operator for many years. It was Tony Richardson, for whom he had worked on A Taste of Honey, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), and Tom Jones (1963), who gave him the Edna O'Brien novel on which the film is based and suggested he direct it.

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.