The Entertainer (1960)

hyped garbage

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Brilliant and touching

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Laurence Olivier reinvented himself in The Entertainer and set to work with the angry young turks of British theatre and film. A new generation of talent like John Osbourne and Tony Richardson who would had regarded Olivier as yesterday's man as this film introduces Albert Finney and Alan Bates, the next generation of great actors.Legend has it that Olivier initially dismissed the new generation of left wing playwrights that emerged in the 1950s. When Olivier was directing The Prince and the Showgirl, Arthur Miller then married to Marilyn Monroe showed up in London and wanted to see the plays by these young up and coming talent. Olivier accompanied Miller to the theatre and after the show asked Osbourne to write something for him, the result was The Entertainer.Olivier plays washed up music hall comedian Archie Rice. He was never as funny as his father. He has evaded paying his taxes for twenty years, an undischarged bankrupt who has not paid his co-workers and worse of all, he is not making his audience laugh.Set during the time of the Suez crisis, the moment Britain realised they were no longer a world power. Archie's son who is in the army is kidnapped out in Egypt. He is in a loveless marriage with second wife Phoebe and as ever he has a wandering eye and at the moment shacked up with the runner up of the Miss Great Britain contest. Archie hopes her family will bankroll his next production.Archie's family wants him to move to Canada to start a new life in the hotel business, but Archie clings on to that next big break that will never come his way. Like Britain, Archie is decaying and in decline, unable to afford the bills.The film has an outstanding performance from Olivier. Despite the plaudits and the Oscar, Olivier knows he is fighting for his legacy by showing the new generation that he still has what it takes to blow everyone off the screen. The film was shot on location Morecambe and Blackpool, two seaside resorts in Lancashire that were still experiencing the glory days in the early 1960s when this film was made. I used to work near the Winter Gardens in Blackpool in the late 1990s, at which time the resort were experiencing mainly day visitors and some of the old backstreet hotels were now residences for people on social security. At least it was in better shape than Morecambe, an area my work also covered. That was in need of the last rites.

It's interesting that some 70/80% of the reviews I've read here on IMDb were posted by Americans who may or may not subscribe to the view that The Entertainer is a metaphor for a once-great Empire slipping gradually off the world stage. The fact that they are American may account for the fact they fail to mention the ultimate irony that John Osborne, the original 'Angry Young Man' and iconoclast extraordinary to the house of Middle Class England became himself eventually a fully paid-up member of the Establishment. As someone who has always found Olivier as overrated an actor as Hitchcock is a director, and not fit to unscrew the top off Michael Redgrave's tube of Leichner No.5 I endured rather than enjoyed his mannered performance - even John Slater in a touring production of the play equalled if not eclipsed Olivier - and found the entire cast ho hum.

So wrote John Osborne in his Note to the First Edition of his play "The Entertainer" published in 1957.It was intended as a metaphor for the decline of this country as both a colonial and world power which was hastened by Eden's ill - judged invasion of the Canal - Zone of Egypt in response to Col.Nasser's closing of the Suez Canal itself. Written in response to Olivier's request for a play to"turn away from a trivial voguish theatre slanted to please the upper middle class" it initially caused Osborne some doubt about casting the theatrical knight in a play where criticism of the Government's handling of the Suez crisis was implicit."It seemed as dangerous as exposing the Royal Family to politics". Archie Rice is a second - rate Music Hall comedian,a "stand - up" in that awful modern phrase.In the years before television became omnivorous a comic could tour the country for decades with what was essentially the same act,a situation that would be familiar to both him and his father who had been a headliner in his day,a position Archie had never and would never occupy. In contrast to the orthodox theatre,Music Hall depended on the flow of action and response across the footlights,the audience forming a symbiotic relationship with the performer rather than passively watching an immutable series of events take place on the stage.In "The Entertainer" this difference is realised by setting Rice's stage performances between sequences involving his family and other events in his "real" life. Osborne was a huge fan of Max Miller although he always denied Rice was based on him."I loved Max because he embodied a kind of theatre I admired most.His method was danger....danger he might go too far". Archie Rice was no Max Miller,he was crude and loud where Miller was querulous and childishly innocent. The possibility that Olivier may once have been a daring actor has probably never occurred to an audience brought up on his mainly underwhelming movie performances from the last 30 or so years. To see him rage against the machine in "The Entertainer" will be a salutary experience,I promise. Rice is a stubborn,prejudiced,bathetic,vain and superficial man He is a would - be serial adulterer,a seducer of impressionable girls and an opportunist.But for all these shortcomings he is a human being. He and his family squabble and fuss and try to ignore the outside world until it forces itself on them when the son is killed at Suez. As Archie Rice he bellows at the Balcony,shouts at his family,schmoozes a beauty contestant to get access to her rich mothers purse strings. It is a bravura show,and one that has come to be recognised as his signature performance away from the Bard. Olivier displays the manic energy of the man "Born in a Trunk" who has known no other life,indeed fears any other kind of life. However,"The Entertainer" is by no means a one - man - show. The Rice Family are played as a true ensemble with the dynamics immediately recognisable to anyone who has shared a home with siblings and parents.The great Roger Livesey has dignity and authority as Archie's father,the former headliner with a reputation in the profession his son can never aspire to.He vainly tries to keep his brood together as everything descends into chaos. There is a brief appearance by Miss Shirley Anne Field,daughter of the great British Music Hall comedian Sid Field,a small irony in itself. Miss Field,a woman of unusual beauty and talent,seemed about to embark on a glittering movie career especially after appearing opposite Steve McQueen in "The War Lover",but it didn't happen.It is one of the many small tragedies of the British Cinema. The late Thora Hird plays her mother,the woman Rice wants to back his show "Rock 'n'Roll Newd Look".She rarely played a totally sympathetic part and it is a tribute to her strength of purpose and sense of self that she became a genuine Brtitish Institution. But the movie is now remembered as Olivier's "The Entertainer" rather than Osborne's,and the image that remains in the mind's eye is Snowdon's iconic photograph of the actor with his little grey bowler,bow tie and crumpled jacket,his face a horror mask of manic laughter.

Spoilers herein.I love films where the context of the film perfectly matches its content. Here we have an aging star vainly trying to hold on. Olivier was much celebrated in his youth for his energetic reading of Shakespeare. That's a plus in Britain where accident has forged the notion that his plays are all about providing empty vessels for actors with power and nerve. Quite apart from the dangers of so limiting Shakespeare, this limits a career too. If one is rooted in the theatrical, and one is celebrated for overjuicing roles in such a way that they thrill, then like any other athlete, you are doomed to fade. And this, just as your peers are blossoming as cinematic icons!That's what this story is about as well.That energy is essentially sexual. How does an older man regain sexual energy? By taking a young lover of course. That is both what our character and actor does, placing their beauties in their productions. Joan Plowright is the center of the project, and rightly so. Around her, his grandness publicly explores what it means to be out of gas with the world on your case.Intellectually, this is a profoundly interesting project. But the bottom line is, well he IS out of gas.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 4: Has some interesting elements.