Word: lester
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...Knack...and How to Get It is an utterly delightful movie about callousness, maladjustment, repression, and revenge; and if these strike you as impossible ingredients for a comic ragout, you have failed to consider the light and certain touch of Richard Lester, who mixed them. Lester is a young Philadelphia expatriate who started out doing British television commercials, attracted Peter Seller's notice, and directed him in a short (The Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film). He then won fame and fortune with A Hard Day's Night and further fortune with Help! Between Beatles films he made The Knack, which...
...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...
...Knack originally was a talky, one-act play (by Ann Jellicoe), and in opening it up, Lester set himself a difficult challenge, 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...
Although The Knack gives almost a magical impression of freshness, there is little in it technically that is new. Perhaps Lester's major innovation is his use of a chorus. As Nancy alights from her bus, or Tolen and date roar by on his motorcycle, a succession of middle-aged onlookers mutter about the degeneration of youth. (Sometimes we hear only their voices, as in counterpoint.) The comments abound in unintentional puns, doubles entendres, and misunderstandings...
Climaxing a two-week guessing game, Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson last week gave the widely expected answer and called a general election for Nov. 8. After 29 months of remarkably successful minority rule, Mike Pearson apparently feels strong enough to win more than the six additional seats he needs for a majority in the House of Commons...