Word: colin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Topping the film's unholy triangle, Rita Tushingham deserts her waif roles to play a strident Teddy girl, sexwise and pound-foolish. Partly because housewifery sounds easier than getting a job, she marries a boyish motorcycle enthusiast, Colin Campbell. Their formal wedding, with cyclists revving up outside the church, is a travesty of gracious living. And Director Sidney J. Furie (The Ipcress File) weaves lively, sharp-eyed observation into a rowdy reception followed by the couple's honeymoon at a dreary resort...
Marriage, they slowly discover, means piling up dishes, stretching pennies, squabbling over whether or not to move in with Colin's aging grandma. But Rita's only real concern is the precise shade of her hair. "They done it pink champagne instead of pink platinum," she whines, grieving over a fake-blonde pompadour that makes her look like a malicious caricature of Princess Margaret. Her young husband eventually finds more comfortable companionship with a motorcycling mate, Dudley Sutton, who all but steals the movie as a butchy, baby-faced homo in hood's clothing. In the boys...
Lester acknowledges the element of fantasy--with a sardonically Brechtian smile, perhaps?--by inserting scenes in which imaginings take shape as fact. Visually, the film's motif is whiteness--the sky throughout is a dazzling white; much of the action takes place in the white living room; Colin and Tolen dream of lines of white-sweatered girls, whom Lester renders in overexposed, high-key photography--and the white makes even the most prosaic actions, the ones that might "actually" occur, seem slightly unreal...
...which he compounded by his non-naturalistic approach. Yet he is strikingly successful. His hallmark is a jumpy, free-association style of editing, and The Knack is made up of very short scenes like blackout sketches and several longer set pieces (such as the already-famous one in which Colin, Tom, and Nancy push, paddle, and ride a Victorian wrought-iron bed through London). To a wild, try-anything-a-couple-of-times sense of humor Lester brings an understated visual style. What might be unbearably corny in other hands scores through its restraint. Nancy, for example, seeks directions from...
What makes The Knack fresh, of course, is Lester's verve. It is in fact so much a director's picture that characters tend to take precedence over performances. Yet the acting--by Rita Tushingham as Nancy, Ray Brooks as Tolen, Michael Crawford as Colin, and Donal Donnelly as Tom--is impeccable. And the dialogue, except for a bit of repetitiousness now and then, has the sound of dead-on improvisation. It all adds up to a cool, inventive, very funny film...