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
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