Richard Lester (b. 1932) cultivated a certain signature , one that is fragmented and breathtakingly quick; it hosts an amalgam of influences from television adverts, comic-strips and downright Goon Show surrealism. He was at his height in A Hard Days Night, released in 1964 and the subsequent The Knack (1965), both of which were photographed impeccably in black-and-white and set in highly stylized, dazzling decors. A Hard Day's Night, a jocose, fictionalized documentary that parodied Richard Leacock's hallowed direct cinema style - enshrined the mythos of the decade's greatest cult heroes - the Mop Tops.
And though A Hard Day's Night earned the American born Lester his name, the film's spurts of visual virtuosity and its sly absurdist sense of humor had been overshadowed just two years earlier in a modest low-budget quickie directed by him, This was It's Trad Dad (1962), aimed to cash in on the brief vogue for Dixieland jazz and featured an assortment of contemporaneous popular bands and vocalists.
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| No, the Knack is that way, don't you chaps ever ask for directions? |
In a sense, 1965, you could say was the Lester Year just as much as it was yesteryear in the popular cinema. At the esteemed Cannes Film Festival his film The Knack, which starred West End wunderkind Michael Crawford, the incomparable Rita Tushingham and Ray Brooks, carried off the top prize; this incisive, affectionate fantasy that focuses on a group of young devil-may-care London flat-dwellers had the metropolitan sophistication denied to Lester's previous projects without sacrificing any of their vitality. However rapidly the term may have become a stale cliche. The Knack by and by helped put the swing in Swinging London.