Old Yorker

  • The Knack … and How to Get It

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Lester (1965)

    Ann Jellicoe – who died in August this year, a few weeks after her ninetieth birthday – is best known as the author of two stage plays, The Sport of My Mad Mother and The Knack.  The latter, performed at the Royal Court in 1962, became a successful film three years later, making money and winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes.  Charles Wood adapted the Jellicoe play for the screen; Richard Lester – in between his two Beatles films, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965) – directed.  The Knack … and How to Get It hasn’t aged well – except for the John Barry score (see more below) and as an exemplar of a self-consciously hip, zany British film of its time.  The expanded title, the ellipsis especially, announces the arch tone.  The visuals (David Watkin was DoP) are punctuated throughout by occasional speeded-up sequences, freeze frames and droll stating-the-obvious subtitles.  Wood and Lester have added too a running commentary on the youthful protagonists’ behaviour from a succession of disapproving oldsters – a kind of grumpy Greek chorus.  On the plus side, The Knack does yield the guaranteed historical interest of a film shot on location in London half a century ago, complete with such redolent period details as a Green Shield stamps book and Reveille magazine on a newsstand.

    The knack in question is that of getting girls.  A prologue, the most stylish sequence in the whole picture, introduces the theme and two of the principals – the unusually named Tolen (Ray Brooks), who has the knack, and Colin (Michael Crawford), who hasn’t and is anxious to acquire it.   Over the opening titles, these two young men interact with a line of young women wearing the same outfit – tight white ribbed polo-neck jumper, medallion necklace, light-coloured skirt (the film is black and white).  Their uniform and their glazed appearance give the girls the look of mass-produced mannequins.  A few, as they wait their turn to be appraised by Tolen and to reject Colin, do aphrodisiac things – one consumes an oyster, another sprays perfume on – but in an automatic, disengaged way.   The sequence takes place in Colin’s house, where Tolen has a room.  The pair are friends but, more conspicuously, polar opposites. Tolen is a suavely voracious Don Juan, Colin an anxious, geeky schoolteacher.  Tolen’s appearance and lifestyle are a composite – Teddy Boy hairstyle, mod suit and tie, rocker’s motorbike, jazz records.  (Did Lester and Wood feel Tolen had to cover all these bases because the youth-of-today complaints from the middle-aged and elderly are wholly generic?)  The third principal, and the pivotal character, is the wide-eyed Nancy (Rita Tushingham), who arrives in London from the provinces.  Nancy is looking for a YWCA but ends up in Colin’s house, where her presence gradually shifts the balance of power.

    Of the two other significant male characters, one who never appears makes a stronger impression than the one who does.  The single set of Ann Jellicoe’s play is a room in Colin’s house occupied by a tenant called Tom, who is decorating the place.  In the film, Tom (Donal Donnelly) arrives at Colin’s some way into the narrative, after hurriedly exiting his previous digs.  Tom does some painting and hangs around with the main characters but, with the action moving around the house and often outside it, he seems largely surplus to requirements.  The unseen Rory McBryde, on the other hand, develops a mythic status.  Rory is frequently invoked by Tolen in admiring terms as a man with the knack.  A late sequence takes place at the Royal Albert Hall, where the ranks of girls from the film’s opening, and many more, congregate for what’s advertised on a poster as Tolen and Rory’s ‘Old Friends Reunion’.  Some of the girls are holding placards emblazoned with Rory’s name; none of them appears to recognise Tolen.  He tries and fails ignominiously to enter the building, through the Artists Entrance via the queue of girls, who trample him underfoot.  A dishevelled Tolen returns to Colin’s house to discover that Nancy and Colin are now an item.   In the closing scene, these two walk off together hand in hand.  The vanquished Tolen joins the older generation’s chorus of disapproval.

    The Knack‘s best-known bit (longer than I expected and quickly tiresome) involves Colin, Nancy and Tom pushing a large bed, which Colin will need once he’s got the knack, around London streets.  The film’s most startling and puzzling element is Nancy’s accusations of rape.  Tolen first gives Nancy an unwanted kiss on the lips then, when the two of them are out together, pesters Nancy again.  She faints and, as soon as she comes to, begins to shout that Tolen has raped her.  She continues to do so for several screen minutes, though she sometimes struggles to vocalise the word and, when she does, no one seems to hear her.  One of the friends with whom I watched the film, and who has read the play, tells me the words in Charles Wood’s script are reasonably faithful to those of the original concerning the alleged rape.  That faithfulness reflects Ann Jellicoe’s puzzling ambiguity.  Tolen’s reassuring remark to Nancy after he’s first kissed her – ‘no one’s going to rape you – girls don’t get raped without their consent’ – has the clear ring of feminist irony.  Yet Nancy, as Tolen approaches her in the park, warns ‘mister tight trousers’ to keep his distance in an increasingly hysterical speech that culminates in ‘Don’t come near me … come, come near me – come, come …’ before she swoons to the ground.  The absurdist levity of Lester’s direction, however, flattens out the seeming contradictions of the writing.  In theory, the alleged rape might be shocking because unexpected in this cartoonish context.  In the event, it’s just another example of the prevailing wacky superficiality.

    Although she’d also played Nancy on stage, Rita Tushingham’s eccentric gamine look and one-level acting fit all too comfortably into the knowing, antic world of Richard Lester.  The underrated Ray Brooks is a rather different matter.   His playing of Tolen, precisely stylised in the early stages, takes on more naturalistic, even human shadings when Tolen starts losing the upper hand and his cool.  Michael Crawford doesn’t overdo Colin’s naïve underdog charm – even if the role, in retrospect, looks like a rehearsal for Frank Spencer.  (I’m assuming Crawford did his own stunts in The Knack, as he famously did in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em.)   As Tom, Donal Donnelly is hyperactive and not as funny as he seems to think.  There are cameos from, among others, John Bluthal (an angry father), William Dexter (an oleaginous dress-shop owner), Dandy Nichols (Tom’s landlady) and Benedict Cumberbatch’s mother Wanda Ventham (a gym mistress).   John Barry’s witty, breezy music, which includes an enjoyable organ solo by Alan Haven, is a fine expression of the spirit of Swinging London cinema – and more.  The main melody’s yearning quality transcends the zeitgeist.

    30 October 2017

  • The Conversation

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Francis Ford Coppola (1974)

    Francis Ford Coppola, inspired by the perception vs reality conundrum of Antonioni’s Blow-Up and anxiety about the developing techniques of surveillance and wiretapping, started writing the script that became The Conversation in the late 1960s.  It was a coincidence that the film finally saw the light of day in early 1974, when the Watergate scandal was continuously in the headlines.  Topical it may have been but this remains a fascinating film more than forty years on.  The sound-recording technology that generates the plot, though now antique, is as spooky as ever.   (Its antiquity may actually increase its spookiness – certainly its strangeness.)  Because The Conversation is a compelling character study, it is genuinely a psychological thriller.

    Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), who now runs his own surveillance company in San Francisco, has the professional reputation of being ‘the best bugger on the West Coast’.  With his colleague Stan (John Cazale) and several freelance operatives, Harry bugs the conversation of a young woman and man (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest), two among a crowd of people in San Francisco’s Union Square.  Operatives stationed at different points around the Square record the conversation, some of which is picked up immediately.  The pair express a fear of being watched.  They talk about meeting in a hotel room a few days hence.  When they see a tramp out cold on a park bench, the woman says:

    ‘Every time I see one of those old guys, I always think the same thing … I always think that he was once somebody’s baby boy.  Really, I do.  I think he was once somebody’s baby boy, and he had a mother and a father who loved him, and now there he is, half dead on a park bench …’

    Much of the rest of what’s said is muffled or distorted by the hubbub of background noise.  After Harry’s painstaking work to merge and filter the various tape-recordings, the words are entirely audible but their meaning remains ambiguous.  The conversation is thus the auditory equivalent of the photograph in Blow-Up but paranoia, which is mostly implicit in Antonioni’s film, is salient in Coppola’s, thanks to the personality of his main character.

    Harry Caul lives alone in an apartment protected by a triple-lock door.   To describe the inside of the place as sparsely furnished is putting it mildly.  There is a telephone but Harry makes calls only from pay phones.  His office, occupying part of a warehouse, is enclosed in wire mesh.  He regularly visits and sleeps with a woman (Teri Garr) but she is frustrated that she still knows next to nothing about him.  This pathologically private protagonist, superbly played by Gene Hackman, is a memorable creation, right down to his name.  Harry is ordinary; Caul has a glum, colourless sound but a rich significance.  A caul is part of the amniotic sac that may cover a baby’s head at birth, and in the context of the film, it connotes both a covering and an innate condition.  Harry wears, in all weathers, a mac – like a suit of armour, except that it’s made of thin, translucent material.  His feelings of paranoia seem inseparable from his propensity to a twofold guilt – a function of his strict Catholicism and the legacy of a past wiretapping job that resulted in the murder of three people.

    In spite of his elaborate precautions, Harry is disturbed to discover, almost from the start of the film, that he is accessible, and therefore vulnerable.  He returns home from supervising the Union Square recording to find a birthday present waiting for him inside the apartment.  At a surveillance convention taking place in San Francisco, Bernie Moran (Allen Garfield), a crude showman whom Harry despises professionally and personally, startles him twice – first by revealing what he knows about Harry’s earlier career, then with a practical joke:  Moran presents him with a freebie pen that conceals a recording device.  Harry becomes obsessed with the Union Square dialogue and convinced that the client (Robert Duvall) for whom he recorded it means to harm the overheard couple:  it becomes clear that the woman is the client’s wife and the man she was with her lover.  The momentum of this thriller thread builds in tandem with Coppola’s dramatisation of Harry’s increasing inability to find a safe place for himself – in the outside world, his apartment or his mind.

    In the event, he fails not only to prevent a murder from happening but also to guess who is to be murdered and by whom.  In The Conversation’s famous closing episode, Harry receives a warning on the apartment telephone.  The voice of the client’s creepy assistant (Harrison Ford) warns him, ‘We’ll be listening to you’.  Harry takes the apartment to pieces – the floorboards, the cheap Madonna figurine that was virtually its only ornament – in a fruitless attempt to discover the bug he now knows must be there.

    The Conversation’s schematic structure and realistic style occasionally conflict.  It’s unlikely that anti-social Harry – shortly after being enraged that he let his guard slip with the bugged pen and, as a result, was publicly made a fool of – would go back to his workplace with Moran and other convention delegates for a late-night drinking session.  This extended and important episode is developed and played so credibly, however, that you almost forget its inherent implausibility.  And Harry has what is a bad dream in more ways than one:  it’s too neatly self-revealing.  The film’s strengths hugely outweigh its imperfections, though.  With the considerable help of Walter Murch, Coppola uses sound – especially the numerous replays of the key conversation – to discomfiting effect.  (Murch served as both supervising editor and sound designer.  According to Wikipedia, he ‘had more or less a free hand during the editing process, since Coppola was already working on The Godfather: Part II at the time’.)  David Shire’s eerie score is cleverly used too.  There are passages in which it’s so insistent that it’s nagging.  The music will then disappear for some time.  These intervals naturally ensure impact each time it returns.

    The one activity that seems to give Harry Caul something approaching pleasure is, alone in his apartment, putting on a jazz record and accompanying it on tenor saxophone.  At first, this choice of relaxant, cool and stylish, seems too obviously un-Harry-like but its meaning is transformed in the closing scene.  The sax is the only thing in the apartment that Harry doesn’t destroy.  He sits among the debris playing it.  The instrument, it now seems clear, is where the listening device that he couldn’t find is located. The repetition of the Union square conversation on Harry’s equipment reverberates in his head and our heads too.  This increases sympathy with the isolated, unloved Harry Caul – and not just because the ‘he was once somebody’s baby boy’ refrain seems to refer increasingly to him.  The Conversation taps into audience unease that someone is eavesdropping on our lives.  That unease, potent at the time the film came out, is enduring.  Secret recording devices may not be what they were in the 1970s but we can always worry about internet algorithms.

    20 October 2017

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