The 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 won this year's best-film award at Cannes.

The knack is that of seduction; how to get it isn't made explicit, but it doesn't hurt to be falsely accused of rape, apparently. It is some time, though, before Colin, a London schoolteacher who has made it with only two girls in as many years--"I started late," he insists--hits upon this expedient. And until then he must suffer Tolen, who is rooming in his house. Blandly arrogant and condescending, Tolen makes his women stand in line, restricts them to just one word in his guest book, and bestows souvenir medallions. He observes of one curvaceous creature: "That last one has very nice ear lobes."

Into this hotbed of the libido fall Tom and Nancy. Tom hates brown and green so much that he covers every inch of Colin's living room, including the windows, with white paint. Nancy, cloth-capped and wide-eyed, just in from the provinces, starts out looking for the YWCA. But, as she observes when Tom and Colin lift the antique bed on which she is sitting, "I've been picked up, haven't I?"

Retribution and reward are distributed among these four with the fitness of a fairy tale, and that, in effect, is what The Knack is. It's theme is the old Grimm Brother favorite of feeling's triumph over unfeeling, innocence's defeat of evil. Would a rake like Tolen be likely to harbor a secret dread of unjust arrest for rape? Well, no, but we accept his breakdown because we are more interested in seeing that he gets his comcuppance than in justifying it psychologically. And surely our wishes rather than our reallife expectations are satisfied by the simultaneous flowering of the hero and deflowering of the heroine.

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.

The 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 an understated visual style. What might be unbearably corny in other hands scores through its restraint. Nancy, for example, seeks directions from a surveyor as he positions an assistant carrying the sighting pole, and as the surveyor gestures vigorously the second man sidles over into an open sidewalk elevator. He is seen, however, only as a tiny vanishing figure in the background, and after a quick shot of his puzzlement in the store basement the film whizzes on.

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.

What makes The Knack fresh, of course, is Lester's verve. It is in fact so much a director's picture that characters tend to take precedence over performances. Yet the acting--by Rita Tushingham as Nancy, Ray Brooks as Tolen, Michael Crawford as Colin, and Donal Donnelly as Tom--is impeccable. And the dialogue, except for a bit of repetitiousness now and then, has the sound of dead-on improvisation. It all adds up to a cool, inventive, very funny film.