Movie Nation

Every so often in the Spanish-Mexican co-production “Friends Till Death” (Amigos Hasta la Muerte) there’s a new situation, plot twist or character reaction so idiotic and tone-deaf that one is forced to recall how stupid the premise of the picture has been from the get-go.

It’s about a marriage that ends when the wife cheats, breaking up a decades-long friendship because she hooked-up with her husband’s best friend.

But years later, it becomes important to that hospital doctor (or lab tech, unclear) ex-wife that they all make-up because the cuckolder has cancer and mere weeks to live.

Maria (Marta Hazas) tells her ex, pub-owner Suso (Javier Veiga, who wrote and directed this debacle) about the fate of their Mexican friend/classmate/lover/cuckolder Nacho (Mauricio Ochmann). But, get this. She DOESN’T tell the patient. And neither does Suso.

How and where could this ever happen? Who in healthcare, even in the most repressive states, would allow it? People who aren’t blood relatives conspiring to ensure that no one tells a former loved-one he’s dying? I mean, even cuckolders have rights, right?

Everything else that doesn’t make sense in a COMMON sense way spins out of this whopper of a “Never would happen.” Maria being willing to fake her way back into a Suso relationship, even though she gets new evidence how that never really worked. Not that Suso can tell.

Maria wants a baby and can’t have one with Suso, so “Let’s have one with Nacho!”

And Suso? He just rolls with it in “It was meant to be” fatalism.

“Life works out that I had to be cuckolded and he had to get terminal cancer,” he shrugs (in Spanish or dubbed into English).

“Friends Till Death” is meant to be a comedy/dramedy, with Maria and Suso breaking the fourth wall and narrating/giving their spin to the camera about all this nonsense, comical bickering and comical brawling included. The Galicia (northwestern Spain) settings are pretty.

But there’s little heart, humor or pathos to any of this.Nothing clicks between the characters or engages the viewer with them.

And every time something else doesn’t play, every slow-to-develop dopey new twist this tale takes, we’re reminded that it hasn’t made sense, pretty much from the start.

Rating: unrated, fisticuffs and profanity

Cast: Marta Hazas, Mauricio Ochmann and Javier Veiga.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Javier Veiga. A Medio Limón film on Amazon Prime

Running time: 1:37

It’s hard, even for people who lived through it, to remember how weird the American cinema was in the years between “Easy Rider” and “Jaws.”

Old Hollywood, comprising the studios that were being swallowed into conglomerates as the last of the barons who ran them died off, seemed lost. The post World War II audience that sustained them even as public attention shifted mostly to TV were ageing out of moviegoing.

Screenwriter William Goldman’s famous phrase about the town, that “nobody knows anything” was never truer, as a rare blockbuster like “2001” was followed by the Oscar-winning smash “True Grit,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” was chased by “Patton,” and then “M*A*S*H” and “Love Story” and “Posiedon Adventure.”

They knew “genres,” but damned if anybody could figure out the secret to what the public wanted. It was a crapshoot, a time when low-budget projects and newborn filmmakers seemed a safer bet than big budget spectacles, and when nostalgia seemed the safest bet of all.

One way to get a grip on the seismic shift underway 50 years ago is to check into Netflix’s “classics” section and look at the wide range of titles from 1974 on display there — “Chinatown,” “Blazing Saddles,” “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” The weirdest thing on offer has to be “The Little Prince.”

This 1974 children’s film was a musical by Lerner and Loewe, who’d scored with films of “My Fair Lady” and “Camelot,” and most recently bombed with the Western “Paint Your Wagon.”

But fresh on the heels of “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” Paramount lined up Gene Wilder for a role, put legend Stanley Donen of “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Funny Face” behind the camera and went all-in a screen version of a musical based on one of the most beloved children’s books of the last century, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince.”

It’s old-fashioned and trippy, a stumbling novelty picture with sparkling interludes and more heart than life. But where else are you going to hear future character heavy Joss Ackland (“Lethal Weapon 2,” “White Mischief”) sing? What other kid’s musical features Bob Fosse, dressed all in black, from his bowler hot to his spats, complete with gloves, showing us vintage Fosse moves and lines (No “jazz hands,” dammit.) as a “snake in the grass” song-and-dance number staged in the middle of a desert?

The man suffered for his art, never more than in this, I dare say.

Wilder plays a wary, human-hating fox who befriends the prince (Steven Warner, a child with but three screen credits) on the lad’s trip — via a flock of animated doves — from one small planetoid to another.

And Ackland’s a king with no subjects to follow his orders on another solitary asteroid.

Richard Kiley, one of Broadway’s greatest stars of that era, brings his melifluous baritone to The Aviator, a French pilot who crashes on a flight from Paris to India, only to have his attempts to repair the between-the-wars aircraft interrupted by a mop-topped blonde in a military coat, using a sword as his cane.

“If you please, draw me a sheep!”

The pilot’s puzzlement has its limits, as he must wonder if he’s hallucinating this peculiar, other-worldy lad (read the Wikipedia bio of de Saint-Exupéry to see how much of this he took from his own experiences) who begs for drawings and regales him with tales of his travels and fanciful child’s-eye-view of the world.

The allegory the author was going for, which the musical adaptors watered-down, was the loss of innocence and a way of looking at the world. The Aviator has grown up avoiding adults who didn’t appreciate his childhood art.

The Aviator hears that the King, the assorted military men, business folk, vain Rose (Donna McKechnie, another Broadway legend) and the thorns of international totalitarianism threaten the Prince, making the child despair of ever finding his way home, to peace and tranquility.

Some of that is in there, but you have to be looking for it.

Bond movie credits king Maurice Binder never did a sloppier animated opening credits than he did for this picture. At least the film’s short running time was merciful to parents, even if it can’t do justice to the material.

There have been revivals of the musical, but it’s plainly not one of Lerner and Loewe’s most beloved shows. There’s a newer version of this tale, with music by Hans Zimmer, that’s on Broadway through May.

Still, Donen and his crew give us playful in-camera effects and fantastical “Wonka” ish asteroid sets. Kiley shines and is in fine voice, Wilder playfully does what he’s paid to do, McKechnie and Ackland have a little fun and Fosse choreographs himself a little pre-“Chicago” razzle dazzle in a role that is best appreciated excerpted on Youtube.

Whatever its shortcomings, “The Little Prince” remains a curiosity, a fascinating artifact of a Hollywood age when the industry as a whole was lost enough to give auteur directors free rein to make “The Godfather,” “American Graffiti” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Walt Disney was long gone, and children’s cinema practically flatlined. But fear not, because musicals were about to experience the “Chicago/Chorus Line” earthquake.

And whatever you think of the “blockbuster” mentality that set in did to the cinema, “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “E.T.” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” stopped theaters from closing, brought forth the birth of the multiplex and saved the movies for generations to come.

Rating: G

Cast: Richard Kiley, Steven Warner, Gene Wilder, Donna McKechnie, Joss Ackland and Bob Fosse.

Credits: Directed by Stanley Donen, scripted by Alan J. Lerner, based on Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical adapted from the novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. A Paramount release on Netflix, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:28

“Monolith” is an exercise in the simple power of storytelling, compelling voices summoning up all the acting gravitas they can to evoke chills and a fear of a vague, unknown “something.”

Built around a dogged podcaster, her recording studio and her phone, it is the picture of minimalism, a primer on no-budget movie-making and a reminder of what people with imagination were forced to strip down to making movies during COVID lockdowns.

But one can appreciate all that is accomplished with the bare minimum of visual variety and external clues, threats or assistance and still find this thiller wanting. At the end of the day, you’ve got to deliver some payoff worthy of the paranoia and suspense everybody is talking themselves into.

Lily Sullivan plays our interviewer, whom we meet, mid-call, on her “Beyond Believable” podcast. She’s pandering to an audience of the conspiracy-minded, trying to modulate the crazy, and doing it from a position of weakness.

She needs their attention, and as a recently-disgraced journalist whose career took a huge hit when she published what she believed to be true, not what she could verify, she can’t talk down to anybody and be taken seriously.

An anonymous email tip mentions somebody who got something once in her corner of Australia — a “brick.” And from that unpromising tease, she plunges into days of calls, interviews, “verifications” and stories told by a housekeeper, an art dealer, scientists and others as she tries to ascertain who got such “bricks,” what they looked and felt like, what their arrival portends, what the “writing” on them means and how they changed the people who received them.

“It felt like something of someone was trying to talk to me,” assorted nervous interview subjects declare.

And as out interviewer plunges deeper into this “unsolved mystery,” fretting over “something awful is coming” and “the dark forces behind this,” the viewer is allowed to recall her assertion “I’ve just got to make a story that will make people listen.”

The seriousness of the calls, sometimes treated in overlapping audio montages as this “story” “blows up,” the creeping way director Matt Vesely has the camera prowl her parents’ remote and empty — save for a pet turtle named Ian — house, makes us consider what might be coming, if someone on the phone is having her on or if what might be happening is all in this woman’s head.

But there are limits to how much of a chill we can get from implied-not-overt threats, and there’s risk in when you actually get to a put-up-or-shut-up point and a “Monolith” must be produced, that it won’t all have been worth it.

And that’s when this slow-simmer/not-really-building thriller sputters, having exhausted most of the tricks in the “scare you without showing you” filmmaking arsenal.

Not bad, as far as it goes. But not all that, either.

Rating: R, profanity, suggestions of violence

Cast: Lily Sullivan, with the voices of Linn Coper Tang, Matt Crook, Ansuya Nathan and Terence Crawford.

Credits: Directed by Matt Vesely, scripted by Lucy Campbell. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:34

“The Heartbreak Agency” sets up as a German variation on the relationship expert gets his or her just deserts rom-com formula, a Teutonic “Accidental Husband,” “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days” or “Failure to Launch.”

But after a first act that fails to find a single laugh, “Die Liebeskümmerer,” as it was titled in Deutschland, takes a turn towards soggy sentiment and doesn’t really manage that, either.

Rosalie Thomass plays Maria, owner and guru of the titular “agency,” somebody getting a lot of attention and raking in the bucks for running a post break-up counseling service that’s really just an unlicensed or at least under-licensed counseling business.

Karl (Laurence Rupp) doesn’t know a thing about it until his girlfriend (Paula Schramm) tells him he “can’t love,” and that their “sex and breakfast” romance is nothing of the sort. Karl figures “somebody else make her think I’m no good for her” and plots his revenge.

Because he’s a veteran magazine writer. He smells a hatchet job, and pursues it despite warnings from the boss (Arash Marandi). Karl sees Maria’s hearts-decorated office and hears the spiel while trying not to roll his eyes.

The “counselor” is an emotionally blank single mom and labeling her a “narcissistic ice queen” in an online profile is like shooting “fisch” in a barrel. But that gets Karl fired, and only by accepting therapy from Maria and her group counseling sessions and retreats and will he ever write in this town again.

Others in treatment include forlorn and over 40 Sibylle (Denise M’Baye) and ditched-and-won’t-accept it Turgay (Özgür Karadeniz), both of whom get Karl’s glib “advice” on their problems, which they take as seriously as counselor Maria’s.

None of this plays as amusing, and I should add that none of the films whose formula this movie seems inspired by worked all that well, either. Karl has a gay roomie (Jeffrey Hoffmann), for those collecting tired tropes in rom-coms.

Which is why Karl has to see Maria’s soft side, Maria has to see his tenderness and how good he is with her tween daughter because that’s where all this was always going, laughs or no laughs.

German comedies are an acquired taste, and some are so dry you can’t pick up on the fact that they’re supposed to be funny right away. Even by that bending-over-backwards criteria, even if comedy isn’t the main goal here, “The Heartbreak Agency” disappoints.

Stock characters in generic group therapy “sharing” sessions, a story arc as obvious as that big metal ring hanging over St. Louis and generally flat performances aren’t rescued by a Bangles musical running gag (“Eternal Flame”) or anything that points us to a happy ending that wouldn’t satisfy in Hollywood, Hollywood, Florida or Hamburg.

Rating: TV-14, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Rosalie Thomass, Laurence Rupp, Jeffrey Hoffmann, Özgür Karadeniz, Arash Marandi and Denise M’Baye

Credits: Directed by Shirel Peleg, scripted by Antonia Rothe-Liermann and Malte Welding, based on the book by Elena-Katharina Sohn. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

Fan to be serviced or hate-watcher, you owe it to yourself to take a look at Jennifer Lopez’s “This is Me…Now: A Love Story,” an indulgent, album-tie in narrative whose over-the-top visuals and J-Lo explaining J-Lo story are something to see.

Eye candy? Oh my God, yes. Indulgent in the extreme? Sure. But funny? Sometimes.

“I hate that I can’t stop watching,” says Jane Fonda, in character as zodiac goddess Sagittarius. “It;s like a ‘Vanderpump Rules’ marathon, and it’s four in the morning and I stop judging them and I start judging me.”

If we’re judging folks, let’s just note that the Oscar winner is joined by Fat Joe, slightly less convincing as a therapist/marriage counselor than say, Charles Barkley might have been, former “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah, Jay Shetty, science pop star Neil deGrasse Tyson and Keke Palmer.

But there is no judging Keke. Every damned word out of her mouth is funny.

“What IS it with this woman and weddings?” she ponders as Scorpio, another of the zodiacs pondering the fate of the once-and-always “Jenny from the Block” as she passes through the many public romances of her “character’s” life — some tragic, one violent, many ill-advised.

Ben Affleck is seen in an opening image, a breathtaking couple-on-a-motorcycle dash across a sea covered tidal flat, a ride that ends in tragedy. Uh-oh, Benny boy.

Lopez and director Dave Meyers & Co. reimagine the song cycle here in visions of steampunk (a “heart” powered by rose petals factory) and epic nuptials to an abusive showdown in a penthouse prison of chrome, windows and shattering mirrors, to a little tribute to “Singing in the Rain” by our still fly flygirl, Ms. Lopez — in fine form and immaculate makeup and sexy outfits throughout.

“Jenny” weep-watches “The Way We Were,” faces a “relationship addict” intervention from her rainbow coalition of “friends,” endures therapy and declares “What is wrong with wanting to spend your life with someone?”

And for a minute or two, here and there, we take that to heart. It can’t be easy finding love and domestic happiness at that level of fame. The fact that Lopez has made that her brand, that she’s made music and movies about just that subject, that she’s never far from the headlines or another viral moment of couple exposure and over-exposure, most of them calculated by her, wakes us back up.

But “This is Me” is pretty to look at and intriging in ways that similarly indulgent, artsy and “revealing” productions by such contemporaries as Beyonce can’t quite match. Because while her thin voice might be best appreciated over-produced dance numbers, it’s affecting and plaintive in less adorned ballads. And the fact that Lopez is a good actress underneath the “image” (and vanity) makes us believe her, even when we know better.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Fat Joe, Jane Fonda, Keke Palmer, Trevor Noah, Jay Shetty, Kim Petras, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jenifer Lewis and Ben Affleck

Credits: Directed by Dave Meyers, scripted by Jennifer Lopez and Matt Walton. An MGM/Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:05

They spent some money on music rights for this 1991 period piece, cleverly timed to come out on the cusp of spring break.

The cast? They saved some cash there.

Beware the Ides of March, for that is when Republic Pictures unleashes a little known cast and a rude teen rom com that makes the flirting possible.

No film buff could walk by the promise of a new Larry McMurtry biography, remember “Hud,” “The Last Picture Show,” “Terms of Endearment,” “Lonesome Dove” and “Brokeback Mountain” and not at least stop to thumb through the book’s photos. But if you love movies, and modern and period piece Westerns, you need to do more than browse.

Tracy Daugherty’s “Larry McMurtry: A Life” is a detailed appreciation of the writer who read and wrote his way out of Archer City, Texas — his struggles, his loves, his stumbles and the successes that piled-up once Hollywood figured out that he did a better job creating novels that could become great films than just about anybody in fiction.

He could have been a third generation West Texas rancher, and did his share of riding and fence-mending and cattle work growing up. But Larry McMurtry came along just after that cattle era had passed, living not just on a ranch but with men and women worn down by the work, wondering where their way of life had gone. McMurtry made his reputation on stories about that soon to vanish or vanished world, from “Horseman Pass By,” which became “Hud,” to “The Last Picture Show,” set basically in his hometown on its death bed, all the way to a real cattle drive Western, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lonesome Dove.”

As Daughterty quotes McMurtry as recognizing, his gift for characters, colorful, natural dialogue and settings set him apart from the pack and brought producers, screenwriters and directors to his door, time and again over his long life and career, which ended with his death in 2021 at age 84.

Daugherty psychoanalyzes McMurtry’s love-hate relationship with Texas, Texans, Hollywood and the American literary heirarchy.

With book after book and film after film showing a great sensitivity and appreciation for female characters, Daugherty details the writer’s lifetime of love affairs, crushes and creative collaborations with women — among them Polly Platt, wife and under-credited collaborator with her husband Peter Bogdanovich, who ditched Platt when Peter B. took up with model-starlet Cybil Shepherd while filming “The Last Picture Show” in desolate Archer City and environs.

We’re treated to large samples from McMurtry’s correspondence. He was an early pal and somewhat friendly competitor with Ken Kesey before “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” an open-hearted love letter writer, with his long missives breaking down his first marriage, his crush on his first agent, and Kesey’s wife, whom he later married, among his extensive archive.

And Daugherty recalls this most bookish of writer’s quiet, observant and sometimes curmudgeonly persona, a serious novelist of popular fiction that often transcended its genre and became true literary fiction — taught in the same academia he labored in, against his will, between books until Hollywood started paying his bills.

L.A. was “like working in a city filled with immensely attractive children,” McMurtry opined. “The people, who have all the power and the all the money and a portion of the charm, also have the patience spans of two-year-olds.”

McMurtry leaned into the “Texan” thing as his brand, even as he moved from coast to coast and acquired a true Man of Letters reputation, not just an academic but as a book-hound who found an outlet for his mania, opening book stores and collecting and selling rare titles, erotica and even historical pornography. He rose to great popularity, and when he accepted that Oscar for co-writing “Brokeback Mountain,” he made damned sure he took the stage wearing Levis and boots.

This is the nuttiest promotion for a movie since a studio sent out boxes of plastic tomatoes to create buzz for “Fried Green Tomatoes.”

But it’s different. Check it out. There’s a LOT of Jack Black in this and no, it’s not all “ohms” and chakras. Don’t let the yoga cultists have all the chill!

Excellent production values and solid special effects were squandered on the Korean blockbuster “The Moon,” maybe the dumbest space flight picture since we learned, for certain, that the Moon isn’t made of cheese.

It’s a space disaster movie of the “Apollo 13” “Gravity” variety, and it’s as dumb as a bag of Hyundais.

A few geopolitical points about how the moon might be the subject of conflict over mineral exploitation in the future, prompting a different sort of “space race” are lost in a blur of bad science, melodramatic calamities and performances that drift from xenophobia to jingoism and settle into sentimental slop with the occasional blast of hysteria.

It’s the very embodiment of The Wrong Stuff.

Korea’s second attempt to put men on the moon, one not-sanctioned by an International Space Consortium and condemned by NASA thanks to a launch disaster years before — meets with a similar fate as it approaches the moon.

Solar flares cause system failures, things blow up and an idiotically ill-advised spacewalk kills two of the three astronauts on board.

Wide-eyed, panic-prone, hapless and under-qualified Hwang Seon-woo (Do Kyung-soo) might be stranded in space. As he’s the son of a command module designer who killed himself in shame after that failed previous mission, getting him home to save national and political face is imperative.

He speaks enough English to have a shot at salvation.

“Mayday mayday! Please rescue Me!”

But let’s bring in the previous Cap Com (Sol Kyung-gu), also a command module “architect,” to bring him home. Captain Kim Jae-guk tries to call in favors from his ex, Moon Young, who runs the “Lunar Gateway” space station circling the moon for NASA.

A country of 50 million+ and everybody in this space mess is not just related, but closely related.

Moon, who goes by Jennifer (Kim Hee-ae) amongst her American colleagues, won’t break protocols, even if the endangered astronaut is the son of the designer who killed himself and thus Kim Jae-guk’s late partner.

There’s plenty here that could be taken for comedy — Kim Jae-guk’s comically aborted snowy boar hunt precedes his summons (“I forgot the bullets!” — in Korean with English subtitles), for starters.

But it wasn’t meant to be a comedy, no matter how much Buzz Aldrin laughs.

Rating: unrated, violent deaths in space

Cast: Do Kyung-soo, Sol Kyung-gu and Kim Hee-ae

Credits: Scripted and directed by Yong-hwa Kim. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:10

Seems to me I’ve started watching “The Entertainer” several times over the years, got one look at Lord Olivier in greasepant and gloves, tap dancing and singing, and thought “Well, not tonight.”

A melancholy tale of a dying art form in a Britain on 1950s life support, a film adaptation of a play that heralded the rise of “kitchen sink realism” in British theater and cinema, the movie that introduced Joan Plowright to the movies (and to Laurence Olivier, who married her), early performances by Alan Bates and Albert Finney, there are scores of reasons to see “The Entertainer.” But it does have that “You have to be in the right mood” vibe about it.

Olivier is brilliant, the very embodiment of a hustling, bullying, bantering “music hall comic,” from his painted eyebrows to his “MY” “show must go on” ethos. Archie Rice is both a villain and a figure of pity, an aged performer and womanizer, liar and exaggerator, a conservative forever bitching about “the INcome tax” he hasn’t paid and that he’s sure will put him in jail if he ever stops sprinting.

But as one punter in the peanut gallery notes to her mum watching his latest show, “Does he think he’s funny?”

John Osborne’s play, which he and Nigel Kneale adapted for the screen — with stage director Tony Richardson moving behind the camera as he filmed the show in seedy, seaside and stodgy Morecambe — depicts a Britain in the very pit of its postwar despair. The Suez Crisis is part of the backdrop, a blunt reminder that “The Empire” was finished.

And every young person seen here — Archie’s daughter Jean (Plowright), his adoring, stage-managing son Frank (Bates), his second wife Phoebe (Brenda de Banzie, in her greatest screen performance) and even his fatalistic soldier-son Mick (Finney) — knows the game is up, the doors have closed to them and that resigned acceptance of their fate or fleeing are their only options.

“You want a bit of life before it’s all over,” Phoebe wails, on hearing that Archie won’t let his latest failing show be his last failing show. Work until “they put you in the box” is all that awaits any of them.

Jean is a frustrated artist turned inner city London school teacher, contending with boorish kids, proto-punk “Teddy Boys” and a posh lover (Daniel Massey) with a roadster, a career and a chance for transfer to a posting in Africa. But Jean, who takes him home to bed, isn’t getting married and moving abroad.

Her family is a mess. Grandpa (Roger Livesay, grand) is her reminder that the Rices have been in show business for generations. But it’s the end of the road, and Archie’s the only one who won’t see it.

He MC’s a beauty pageant, and one of the judges mutters “Where did they dig HIM up?”

The owner of a popular theater wonders, “Why don’t you leave it alone, Archie? We’ve had our laughs together all this time. Let’s leave it at that.”

But an ambitious pageant contestant (Shirley Anne Field) with showbiz dreams lets us see her calculating how a cringey come-on from Archie could launch her. With her Dad’s money, Archie might get that “next” show up and running, with a juicy ingenue part for Miss Runner-Up.

Maybe he’ll be able to juggle all the women, the creditors, back-pay-owed show people and his family and the show will go, after all.

Olivier talked Osborne into writing the play for him, and the playwright’s toxic narcissist “hero” bears some resemblance to Olivier’s own reputation.

But Archie is still one of the great stretches of Olivier’s career, a tragic and loathesome figure whose desperation and mean-spiritedness seems to peek out from under the makeup. I’ve interviewed a lot of venerable comics doing “The Blue Hair Circuit” of Florida venues, and one can see and hear all of them in Archie’s clawing, accusatory, “Blimey, that went better in the FIRST house” crack at a dust covered joke that doesn’t land.

To an old comic, when the material doesn’t work, it’s the fault of “audiences today” not measuring up.

The act is so old it creaks, even if Archie doesn’t as he gives us “a little song … called ‘The Old Church Bell Won’t Ring Tonight Because the Bishop’s got the Clapper.'”

Osborne’s script shows us a lot of out-with-the old, in-with-the-uncertain. The Suez updates, with son Mick in peril, don’t rattle Archie as much as they should. Grandpa gripes about the end of imperialism, Mick promises to “bring a fuzzy-wuzzy home” as a souvenir and Archie, who jokes about “the colored fellow” (dancer) who lives downstairs, lets us glimpse his recognition of the pure art of a “negress” singing “about Jesus” in an American club that he heard once.

That’s his clue, he suggests, that we’re all equal and that another of Britain’s “old ways” — racism and “white man’s burden” supremacy — is going to have to die out, too.

Like Osborne’s breakout play, “Look Back in Anger” and other films and plays of the era, “The Entertainer” is a serious, somber eulogy for a dying way of life, and an entire civilization about to give way to teenager-ruled pop culture and a more diverse Britain. But Archie still isn’t accepting the guitar band on the bill of his revue.

They’re about to take over, mate. The ’60s are coming.

Film buffs will spy future “Bullitt” and “Breaking Away” director Peter Yates’ name in the credits as an assistant director. He’d work with Finney on another famous stage adaptation decades later — “The Dresser.” As Harry Saltzman, co-producer of the early years of the James Bond franchise, was a backer, it’s hardly a shock to see the estimable character actor Charles Gray as a TV reporter. He was in several Bond films as first an agent, and then as Bond villain Blofeld.

Director Richardson would go on to dazzle throughout the ’60s, winning Best Director and Best Picture Oscars for “Tom Jones,” bringing home “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” and getting many a play filmed on the big screen, from “Hamlet” to “A Delicate Balance.”

Richardson ensures that every performance in “The Entertainer” is spot-on, sharp and only occasionally more theatrical than “real.” Livesay, de Banzie, Plowright and Bates dazzle. But Olivier is the real revelation, for once not attempting to tower over the production, a self-absorbed bully but subtly vulnerable because he, too sees the end.

It’s hard not to think of Lord Larry’s later film appearances through the lens of Archie Rice, just an old ham slinging a French accent in “A Little Romance,” a Zeus seeing the end in “Last of the Titans,” or an old pro smiling at the little limelight left as Lear or Lord Marchmain in “Brideshead Revisited.”

Whatever honors the grand old man of the theater and cinema collected — and he did relish status — maybe that’s how he’d best be remembered — a trouper treading the boards, a professional willing to change with the “kitchen sink realism” times, but hanging on to a hint of the ham, willing to put it all out there even if singing, dancing and joke-telling were never quite his thing.

That’s entertainment.

Rating: TV-14, sexual situations, alcohol abuse, dated racial remarks

Cast: Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, Brenda de Banzie, Roger Livesay, Albert Finney, Charles Gray and Alan Bates

Credits: Directed by Tony Richardson, scripted by John Osborne and Nigel Kneale, adapted from Osborne’s play. A British Lion release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:45