With Mad Men entering the Swinging Sixties — as in "to swing" — it seemed like a good time to survey the career of one Richard Lester, whose movies Petulia and The Knack... and How to Get It embody the spirit of the time better than any others. As I point out in the A.V. Club's "Gateways to Geekery," that's scratching the surface of a long and varied (and sometimes patchy) career that owes as much to Jacques Tati and Ernie Kovacs as it does to the Beatles, who put Lester on the map as the starts of A Hard Day's Night. More in the article, of course, but the short version is this: Watch Robin and Marian at your earliest opportunity, and Superman III is nowhere near as bad as its reputation suggests.
