The Entertainer (1960)

Fantastic!

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

As an American, getting a peek at post-War Britain in decline, a look at Olivier as a most interesting character in the person of never-was vaudevillian Archie Rice, and a look at several British players (Joan Plowright, Anthony Bates, and Albert Finney) very early in their careers is priceless.Archie Rice is a despicable character, and the drama centers on his problems of having all of his financial issues - including some long overdue tax debt - come to a head just as he can finally get no more work as a vaudevillian even in the bad music halls. He has a way out - one of his relatives will pay off his debts if he'll accept his drunken wife's nephew's offer to run a motel in Canada. But like any Briton who can remember England's finer days he's just not about to cut and run, and even though I can despise the lying, the cheating on his used up wife, his odd ideas about parenting, and his willingness to use his own father, I can't help but admire his "pioneer spirit" to use an American term. He'd rather fail on his own terms than succeed on someone else's.Joan Plowright is the other lead, and she plays Archie's daughter, Jean. She shows some pioneer spirit herself. She shares some characteristics with dad - she's a painter who can't paint, Archie's a vaudevillian who can't entertain. Unlike dad, she owns up to her shortcomings and wants to make a contribution anyways by teaching art to poor slum kids. She has a way out of Britain just like dad does. Her fiancé has been offered a job opportunity in Africa, and he encourages her to leave her dead country behind, but she just isn't ready to give up on England or her family just yet. The two have a falling out and Jean goes to visit her dysfunctional family, in which she finds comfort.I just don't get people who say that they don't like this one because it's boring, depressing, ugly. Every minute of this film held my interest and stayed with me long after I'd watched it. I think you need to have lived awhile, to have had disappointments, and to have dealt with those disappointments in ways you may not be proud of to really appreciate this film.

Laurence Olivier stars as a sleazy, third-rate music hall performer in 1960's "The Entertainer", one of the first and best films of the so called Free Cinema movement, and a movie that is somewhat neglected today (it should be better known). Based on a play by John Osborne, Olivier plays Archie Rice, a mediocre performer in grim seaside town theaters. His shows attract few people (early in the film, we see passersby sneering at the theater marquee that falsely advertises Archie as a television comedian). His father, Billy, was once a talented and successful comedian, but now he is just a cranky old man living with him and Archie's wife, the unstable Phoebe. Archie has three grown children, played respectively by Alan Bates, Albert Finney and Joan Plowright, all very early in their careers. Jean (Plowright, who would become Olivier's wife soon after this film) comes to home from London and sees her family unraveling: one of her brothers have been sent to Suez, her stepmother is becoming more and more unstable, Archie is hounded by his creditors while he imprudently starts a romance with a beauty contestant, with the hope of obtaining financing for his shows from her rich parents. Archie's life goes downhill from here, so the film is quite bleak, but it is very well done (and especially, performed). Some critics see Archie as a metaphor of postwar England, and this may indeed have been Osborne's intention, but the film plays better as a character study of a very flawed man.

Laurence Olivier is "The Entertainer," in a 1960 film based on the John Osborne play in which Olivier played one of his greatest roles, Archie Rice. He's surrounded by Joan Plowright as Archie's daughter Jean, and Brenda de Banzie as his emotionally fragile second wife, Phoebe. Olivier, Plowwright and de Banzie all repeat their stage roles, and it was while in the play that Olivier and Plowright met, fell in love, married, and stayed together until his death. Albert Finney is Mick and Alan Bates is Frank, Archie's sons, and Roger Livesey is Billy Rice, Archie's father and a beloved, well remembered music hall performer. Daniel Massey plays the role of Graham. It's an auspicious cast of veterans and newcomers.Archie has followed in his father's footsteps with a lot less success. He's a second-rate entertainer - and that's being kind - in a seaside resort - and his show is in trouble. Archie's in trouble, too, as he's an undischarged bankruptcy and everything is in his wife's name. He's a fairly overt womanizer, which makes his wife a wreck. She's afraid of dying alone and wants the family to move to Canada and join a successful relative in the hotel business. But Archie won't give up following every dream in spite of some harsh realities. He takes up with a 20-year-old second prize beauty contestant - her father's rich and can back his new show.As I read through the reviews on IMDb, I have to wonder where some people's hearts are. That's not a comment on the people, believe me, rather on the world we live in. I can tell you this - if you think what Olivier does isn't special and can't understand why he was nominated for an Oscar, if you can't see that he is Everyman, if you can't see the comment on Britain in general - you just haven't lived enough yet. You'll see this film again one day and it'll hurt, believe me. There can't be anyone my age, especially with ambition and a creative mind, who can't understand what Archie Rice is going through. Though he's in no way a sympathetic character, one can empathize with his life and begrudgingly admire the fact that he refuses to take the easy way out.Jean, since she doesn't live full time with this bad road company version of "Long Day's Journey Into Night" - i.e., her family - is sympathetic to both Phoebe's hysteria and her father's delusions. The scene over the cake - one of the reviewers on the board found it disturbingly realistic - there's someone who knows dysfunction when he sees it. A brilliant scene, but nothing beats Archie's monologue to his daughter when he asks her to look at his eyes. "I'm dead," he says.Olivier has said this is his favorite character as it contains so much of him. It's obvious from interviews with Olivier that it does. Like many highly successful people, he began to see himself as Archie, a kind of fake who, as Archie says, can be warm and smiling and feel nothing. "It's all tricks," Olivier told writer Jack Kroll once. It's not an uncommon feeling. It wasn't all tricks, of course, and as we see in Archie's final version of the song that ran through the film, "Why Should I Care?" he had finally reached the part of himself that makes a truly great artist, like the woman he heard sing the spiritual. Olivier, of course, hit those heights many times.England is pronounced as a "dying country" in the beginning of the film, which sets up the metaphor of Archie as a symbol of the country. I'm not British - it's for those who lived during that time period in 1960 to comment on it, and they have. There are some brilliant reviews on the board covering that subject."Why Should I Care?" Archie sings. I don't have an answer. But if anyone could make me care, it was always Lord Laurence Olivier, be he the ruined man in "Carrie," the beautiful Heathcliff in "Wuthering Heights," James Tyrone on stage in "Long Day's Journey," or Max de Winter in "Rebecca." An amazing legacy, one in a million - don't miss him as Archie Rice in "The Entertainer."

Archie Rice, the fifty-something vaudeville man at the center of the action, has seen better days. He is relegated to play almost empty houses in a seaside resort of England where he lives with his second wife, Phoebe, his father Billy, and retired vaudevillian, and grown children. Archie has an eye for good looking women, the younger, the better. Archie Rice is a pathetic figure who lives in a world of his own, always scheming about who to involve for one of his new shows, that no one seems to care about.Jean Rice, the young daughter living in London, comes home for a visit and she is horrified when she finds out what his father has turned out to be. Jean sees what Archie is doing to Phoebe when he sees his father kissing a much younger woman in a local restaurant. Archie has been trying to convince her parents about the talents Tina doesn't have, in order to take money from them to produce his new venture, which is only an idea in his wild imagination.Tragedy strikes when young Mick Rice, who we had seen earlier as he goes to fight in the Suez conflict, is first reported being taken prisoner and eventually killed. While Phoebe goes to pieces, Archie keeps doing what he only knows what to do. His final speech to an empty theater, but directed to his daughter Jean, reveals the soul of this troubled man.Tony Richardson made a great impression with his second directorial job. He was attuned to the work of John Osborne, one of England's best playwrights of the fifties and sixties that revolutionized the theater. Mr. Richardson is helped by the crisp black and white cinematography by Oswald Morris, who looks as sharp today as when the film was released.The main reason for watching "The Entertainment" is Laurence Olivier. He completely dominates the action and makes us see how pathetic his Archie Rice is. Mr. Olivier knew this man, having been connected to the theater all his life. No one could have done a better job than him in baring his soul for all of us to see. Laurence Olivier shows a tender side in his scenes with Tina, the young woman who has captured his fancy, and who is so young, she could be his own daughter.The rest of the cast is perfection. Roger Livesey, is seen as Archie's father, Billy Rice, a man that has seen a lot during his lifetime and now lives with a son that he knows is up to no good. Brenda DeBanzie is fine as Phoebe, a woman of a certain age that is losing Archie. Joan Plowright was Jean, the young daughter. Also in minor roles some actors that will go to stardom in their own right, Alan Bates, Albert Finney, and Daniel Massey, who died much too young. "The Entertainer" is a fine film that shows the talents of Laurence Olivier and Tony Richardson.