Le cabotin

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."

This film is about a not especially talented vaudeville-style actor (played by Olivier) who sings a little and does some comedy--but not especially well. It's set in some British town by the sea (probably Brighton) and is set in 1956--when this sort of low-brow entertainment was on its way out and during the Suez Incident (the younger son is sent there soon after the film begins). This actor is pretty obnoxious and brings misery to his family since he's basically no good and selfish. The film switches from his viewpoint to his daughter's (played by Olivier's soon wife-to-be, Joan Plowright). She sees again and again that he's a jerk but despite everything, she is strangely loyal to this rogue. The rest of the family is pretty much living in Olivier's shadow and caters to his every obnoxious whim. The only exception is Olivier's father--an excellent character study of a man who tries to do the right thing by everyone.

Technically speaking, this is a very good film--the actors all did a fine job and the writing was pretty good as well. The problem for me was that I just didn't feel much of a connection, as it was hard to care about any of them. Now this isn't a complaint so much as saying that this type of character study may apply to some, it's not a film that will appeal to a wide audience. I guess my problem is that I have known people like the jerk Olivier played in the film and I felt irritated with him and his family for accepting his obnoxious behaviors. Sure, this is true to life--there are people like the one Olivier played who are users and ne'r do wells and there are many family members that put up with the lies and mistreatment. In some ways, I could see the film as being very therapeutic for some--it just wasn't something I particularly enjoyed or needed to see.

Absorbing, involving, lightening and amusing but then this is adapted from a John Osborne play and even the cinematic opening up and the seeming insensitivity of director Tony Richardson cannot take that away. Instead of a tight and dark tale of a washed up entertainer against the background of a post war, washed up Britain embroiled in a hopeless Suez fiasco, the emphasis is more on family break-up and the last days of Music Hall. Lawrence Olivier is fantastic and Alan Bates excellent in his first film. Albert Finney is effective in an early role but Joan Plowright and Roger Liversey seem out of place in such a film. Opening up the film version, of course, means we get plenty of locations shots of Morecombe and Blackpool but is rather a shame that the full impact of the angry middle aged man and the farewell to old England gets a little lost along the way.

It is amazing to me how many critics and reviewers of this film seem to have missed the subtleties in this story, and in Archie's character. Far from living in a world of futile fantasies, I think, Archie's character is much more accurately expressed by the line "The only thing I know how to do is to keep on keeping on." All available options (Canada, failure, escape, or perhaps, suicide) being unthinkable, what choice has he but to chase another hopeless dream of somehow, finally, nailing a successful show? Perhaps I identify with Archie more strongly than many viewers, having myself been at the helm of a sinking ship (a business.)

One unreasonably scathing critic (did he actually watch this film??) commented on Archie's daughter, Joan's, "blind love" for her father. I think it was not "blind love" at all, but a recognition of the (probably useless) courage Archie has to muster to continue to face each day -- a day likely to hold for him only more demoralizing failure and unceasing accusation and blame. And far from being totally selfish, as some commentators have written, Archie really seems to be the only person in the family able to look beyond the extremely small focus on their own interests: he is, in fact, the only person in the Rice tribe making a real effort, despite the pain, to find a path out of the mess to a place of security for them all.

Perhaps we have forgotten how dependent families were in that era on the earnings of "the breadwinner," and yet, reviewers seem to have been just as blind as many wives and families of that time to what a man often had to give up in order to be that breadwinner, including, as in Archie's case, any fantasies of greatness or even, finally, his last shreds of self-esteem. Was Archie aware of his utter failure? Oh, I think absolutely so. This is why his admission to his daughter that he was "dead" behind his eyes. All the brightness of hope or illusions of personal excellence have been hammered out of him on the iron-cold anvil of real-world failure. Even so, he found it in him to dredge up the understanding and compassion to alleviate his wife, Phoebe's drunken crash into despair and hostility; and shore up his father's nostalgic dreams. Though, alas, the latter, too, led to yet another "unforgiveable" tragedy (-- or was it?.

The most exquisite and poignant tragedy of it all is that maybe, just maybe, Archie might have pulled it off, but for the failure of his clueless family to understand him or the grim realities of his doomed profession. Forget metaphors of Imperial England, this tale has surely played itself out millions of times, whenever a new technology has made an old craft obsolete -- as when the printing press replaced scribes, or when electric lights eliminated the town's lamp lighter, or when automated projectors replaced skilled projectionists. Many of the movie's reviewers, in my opinion, are as blind to what is really going on here as is Archie's family. They assume that Archie's failures are the result of his negligence and selfishness, and that his dalliance with the beauty queen is a real romance (and threat to their security), when, in his eyes, it is just another, necessary, desperate and ultimately demeaning business deal. Joan alone, it seems, finally understands -- far too late to avert the inevitable end. Ultimately, every family member's myopic conception of Archie's reality leads them to take the reflexive steps that seal his doom.

Shakespeare would have been completely a home with this tragic tale, and I think it was not such a great leap away from Hamlet for Olivier.

The story is richly-detailed, unexpected and though-provoking. And Olivier is superb. A stunning performance from beginning to tragically inevitable end.

"The Entertainer" is a fascinating film based on the play by John Osborne ("Look Back in Anger"); Osborne co-wrote the screenplay.

Olivier plays Archie Rice, a fading entertainer in a fading medium (music halls) in a fading empire (the Suez crisis of 1956 figures into the action).

Archie's speech to his daughter (Joan Plowright), onstage in an empty theater, about being dead behind his eyes, is especially memorable.

Along with other fine actors, Alan Bates and Albert Finney as his sons flesh out this film, which is a must-see for fans of any of these actors.