Three Men & a Girl

The Knack . . . and how to get it, as film comedies go, is too clever for its own good. Based on Ann Jellicoe's giddy, free-spirited play--still bouncing along off-Broadway--The Knack tells of a provincial lass (Rita Tushingham) at large in London who stumbles into a house occupied by three oddball bachelors. One is a potent pipsqueak (Ray Brooks), mysteriously endowed with the knack of "making it" with the opposite sex. One is a pallid, reticent schoolteacher (Michael Crawford), for whom the way of a Mod with a maid remains ever beyond reach. The third (Donal Donnelly) is a simple eccentric who spends his energy painting the walls of his room white.

Director Richard Lester, who caught the quintessence of Beatlemania in A Hard Day's Night, sails into The Knack with the same bare-knuckled boldness but less satisfying results. The movie is always inventive and often hilarious, for Lester is not a man to let substance interfere with a sight gag. On film, the characters racket hither and yon in the fashionable New Cinema manner, but they rarely seem insecure, subtly tyrannized by their own drives, or even significantly related to one another.

Some directors struggle continuously to open up a play in film terms: Lester blows the whole show into eye-catching fragments, now freezing the action in frame, now running a scene backward or flashing titles across the screen to identify such commonplace objects as A Saw, A Tool Kit, Girls. The tricks are diverting at first, but finally smack of gimmickry. In the midst of so much frenzy, nothing can really happen, and the dialogue is whipped off at a tommy-gun clip in accents that challenge comprehension anywhere west of Land's End. Only Actress Tushingham and Michael Crawford, in his moments with her, ever truly possess The Knack.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.