The Knack… and How to Get It 1965

Colin Michael Crawford is a nervous schoolteacher in London, watching the swinging sixties roll by from the sidelines. With little personal sexual experience to his name, he longs to master “the knack” of seducing women, convinced there must be a way to learn it rather than stumble into it by accident. To find that method, he leans on a friend and tenant who embodies confidence and bravado, the womanising figure known only by his surname, Tolen Ray Brooks. Colin seeks guidance from this magnetic, if blunt, mentor, who offers blunt, often unhelpful advice about protein intake and the dubious idea that intuition can be taught, even if it isn’t something that can be fully mastered.

Tolen argues for a tough, dominating approach to relationships and even suggests Colin should let another friend move into the spare room so they could “share” women. The notion unsettles Colin but also tempts him with the possibility that real experience might finally arrive if he takes a risk. In a bold move, Colin boards the front door shut, a small rebellion against his own inertia, as the plan to change his life feels increasingly real. Soon after, Tom [Donal Donnelly] enters the scene, strolling by and taking up residence in the same vacant room. He is obsessed with making everything white—walls, windowpanes, and all—an eccentric imprint that foreshadows the offbeat, almost surreal, mood of the entire story.

With the door blocked, Tolen improvises new entrances for his guests, bringing women in through the window instead of the door. Colin’s living arrangement shifts as he swaps his single bed for a gleaming, old wrought-iron double bed that he and Tom discover together in a scrapyard. This bed becomes a bizarre symbol of their shared misadventure and sets off a wild journey back to the house. Nancy Jones [Rita Tushingham] is introduced as an inexperienced and shy young woman who has traveled to London from out of town in search of the YWCA. Along the way, she visits a clothing store and is momentarily won over by the clerk’s smooth flattery, only to hear him repeating the exact same lines to every customer, exposing the hollow performance behind a confident smile.

From the scrapyard, the trio wheels the bed through a chaotic route back to Colin’s house. Their odyssey takes them to a parking meter, then onto a car transporter, then afloat along the River Thames, and finally down the steps of the Royal Albert Hall. The bed’s journey mirrors the film’s comic and surreal energy, a physical manifestation of how the characters are trying to move through a rapidly changing world.

In a crowded public space, the tension explodes when Tolen sexually assaults Nancy, who is initially quiet and then faints. When she awakens, she claims she was raped—though the film makes clear that this claim is not borne out by an actual act. The group struggles to respond, unable to restrain her from loudly repeating the allegations and even resorting to puncturing the tyres of Tolen’s motorcycle in a haze of confusion and bravado. Nancy runs back to the house, throwing Tolen’s records from a window and stripping off her robe in a bold, naked assertion of agency.

As the confrontation intensifies, the men begin to interpret Nancy’s statements as a fantasy rather than a factual event, and they pressure Tolen to engage with her on that basis. The dynamics become a tangled mix of desire, power, and misunderstanding, with each character negotiating their own needs against the shifting currents of attraction and accountability. By the end, Nancy emerges with complicated feelings, finding herself drawn to Colin, and the two of them begin living together, signaling a tenuous, improvised alliance forged in the crucible of misread signals and cultural change.

The film captures a moment in time when personal desire collides with social upheaval, using humor and discomfort to probe questions of consent, power, and the search for self-reliance in a rapidly evolving urban landscape. It remains a provocative, enigmatic portrait of how ordinary lives become entangled in the exuberance and disarray of a era in flux.