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Laurence Olivier excels as a faded music hall star in The Entertainer |
Director: Tony Richardson
Cast: Laurence Olivier (Archie Rice), Brenda de Banzie
(Phoebe Rice), Roger Livesey (Billy Rice), Joan Plowright (Jean Rice), Alan
Bates (Frank Rice), Daniel Massey (Graham), Shirley Anne Field (Tina Lapford),
Thora Hird (Mrs Lapford), Albert Finney (Mick Rice)
In the late 1950s Laurence Olivier was worried about his
career. While he was still doing Shakespeare and Coward comedies (intermixed
with the odd film), the world of acting and theatre was moving on. Not least as
John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was
taking the West End by storm. Olivier seemed the polar opposite of the “Angry
Young Men” of British theatre, a dusty relic. So Olivier changed gears – and
his entire life – by asking to be cast in the lead role of Osborne’s next play The Entertainer. Olivier’s sensational
stage performance – captured here on film – radically changed the path of both
his career and his life, with his long-troubled marriage to Vivien Leigh
broking down during it. But he also cemented himself as the leading British
actor.
Olivier plays Archie Rice, a failing never-has-been
end-of-pier comedy performer at an unnamed Seaside town in 1956. Rice’s
routines are old-and-tired, his comedy tinged with desperation and he’s all but
broke. Archie’s audiences are tired, bored and unamused. His home life, with
his faded former beauty champ wife (Brenda de Banzie) is on the ropes due to
his constant infidelity. His father (Roger Livesey) – a music hall celebrity
with real talent – loves him but thinks he’s a disasater waiting to happen. His
son Frank (Alan Bates) adores him but his daughter Jean (Joan Plowright) is
more realistic. Archie through continues to peddle the idea of a success being
round the corner, trying to put together a hit revue starring his latest
mistress (Shirley Anne Field) and funded by her parents. Things will not end
well.
The Entertainer’s
main claim to historical note is that it captures that sensational stage
performance of Laurence Olivier in the lead role. Olivier had always liked to
claim that, with a few zigs and zags in his career, he would have become a
third-rate comedian. His performance – with its ingratiating patter, it’s seedy
sexually ambivalent campness, his selfishness and self-obsession and greed – is
brilliant. Archie’s entire life is a desperate struggle to get himself the
career he wants – while trying to shut his eyes to his own lack of talent (of
which he is painfully aware). Olivier captures superbly not only the front of a
man bent on self-promotion, but also the dead-eyed horror of a man who is aware
all the time that he is dying inside.
Olivier’s eyes are drill-holes of death, and his life is an
exhibition of selfish patter, with a constant sense of performance in every
inch of Archie’s life. He’s a run-down, finished and disillusioned man trying
to pluck what few moments of pleasure he can from a life he is only going
through the motions in. All of it covered with a coating of self-delusion that
quickly crumbles into sweaty desperation. While the film can only give a taste
of the Olivier stage performance, it re-enforces Olivier’s energy, creativity
and bravery. Olivier’s both bravura and tragically tired music hall
performances alone are worth the price of admission.
Away from Olivier’s exceptional capturing of the washed up
patter of the sleazy loser, it’s easy to overlook most of the rest of the film.
But it’s directed with a kitchen-sink freshness by Tony Richardson, who
brilliantly captures the faded grandeur and grubby failure of a failing seaside
resort. Osborne’s play used the decline of music hall as a metaphor for the
decline of the British Empire and while the film (for all its Suez references)
doesn’t quite convey this, favouring instead domestic tragedy, it still
perfectly captures the crumbling world of Rice and his ilk. Rice’s father –
Roger Livesey, excellent and about a year older than Olivier – is a relic of
the success of this era, and still carries some of its glamour, but still lives
as a virtual tenant in the Rice home, eating spare cake where he can.
While the film is dominated by Olivier, this presentation of
the play as a domestic tragedy works rather well. Brenda de Banzie (also reprising
her role from stage) is very good as an ex-glamour puss (and former mistress of
Archie) now turned into a faded, depressed matron, drunkenly bitter about what
her life has (not) led to. Joan Plowright is excellent as the knowing daughter,
alternately sympathetic and appalled at her father. Shirley Anne Field’s naïve
lover is suitably naïve, under the control of her battleaxe mother, well played
by Thora Hird. The cast is rounded out with Alan Bates and Albert Finney (both
in debuts) as Archie’s sons.
While the film feels a little overlong at times, and is
perhaps too much in thrall to Olivier, it offers a neat kitchen-sink view of
failure and corruption in British life of the 1950s. There is, of course, no
hope and no second chances here. Only the long, wearying decline and rotting as
Archie’s life disintegrates under pressure and his own incompetent
self-delusion.
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