06/03/2002 Entry:
"The Knack - Richard Lester (1965)"

Reading Getting Away With It really piqued my interest in seeing the Richard Lester films, particularly the earlier ones. So it was with great happiness that I saw that Film Center was showing The Knack and The Bedsitting Room this month as part of their English new wave series. This is the first Lester film I've seen (well, OK, except Superman II) and I just loved it. So filled with energy and life. I'm generally curmudgeonly but I was just grinning my head off through a lot of this, especially in the first two acts. Now I'm just more jazzed to see Hard Day's Night and Petulia.

It was really interesting how the film plays with the audience's mood in the last act. At various points we go from shock, to laughter, to horror, to amazement, to smug satisfaction as we see Toland finally get his due and realize that Nancy is much more than she first appeared. I'm betting the ending plays a little differently now than it did then, with society becoming more sensitive about the topic of rape in the years since. Even though it is obvious that one never occured, just the use of the word seems to carry a lot of power in this day and age. All of them standing around saying to each other "You rape her," "No, you go rape her" certainly made me squirm in my seat a bit. The whole growling like a lion scene played out on various levels from one shot to the next as well, seguing from disturbing to comic to nervous and back to comic before you ever really realize its happening. Not just a fun movie, but a truly great piece of filmmaking.

I definitely need to rent this at some point to study the editing more closely. After seeing the film, I went back and read over the portions of Getting Away With It where Lester and Soderbergh talk about this film. One thing Lester points out, which I didn't catch at all, is that he filmed the scenes where Colin boards up his door at 96 fps and then printed every fourth frame. I can imagine that these looked normal, but slightly off somehow. It must be a pretty siubtle effect because I totally missed it.

The cinematography by David Watkin was great throughout, but especially in the scenes where they were all running around the white room. Man, I can't even imagine the hell of trying to light those scenes, but they came out beautifully. The sharp contrast between the deep dark blacks of Toland's suit and the crisp yet not blown out whites of the room were gorgeous. I noticed while watching these scenes that the quality in some cuts was worse than others - increased grain and some blurriness. It turns out that the sound recordist Lester was using during these shoots kept getting the microphone in the frame, so Lester had to reprint them to get around it. This loses a generation, and in some cases I'm betting he actually had to magnify the frame (thus the increased grain.)