Tony Richardson (1960)
The first hour of The Entertainer is excellent. Although it wobbles in the closing stages, this is still the best of the four films set in contemporary England that made Tony Richardson’s name as a screen director in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As a piece of cinema, it’s a real advance on Look Back in Anger, Richardson’s first feature, released the previous year. His opening out of that John Osborne play was, for the most part, artificial. In the case of The Entertainer, it feels organic to Osborne’s material and is doubly effective. The title character, the clapped-out comic Archie Rice, represents the moribund state of music hall. The decaying theatre tradition is a metaphor for the decline of Britain as an imperial power. Richardson shot the film, with a screenplay by Osborne and Nigel Kneale, in Morecambe: the seaside holiday town and its entertainment venues are strongly congruent with Osborne’s subject. Just as important, Richardson and his cinematographer Oswald Morris create a sense of life not only going on around the main characters but connected with them. The other faces on the screen aren’t merely, as they tend to be in Look Back in Anger, a documentary backdrop against which the principals deliver dialogue designed for the stage.
Archie’s son Mick, a soldier with the British forces in Egypt during the Suez Crisis, is the lynchpin between the twin atrophies of live variety and Empire. In the course of the story, he’s a prisoner of war, then released and ready to return home to a hero’s welcome, then is killed by his captors. All this is reported in newspapers (and, in the film, on radio and television too): Mick doesn’t appear at all in the play and is seen only briefly in this adaptation of it. Even so, a major strength of The Entertainer is that its political and cultural critique is fused with a family drama that’s absorbing, gruelling and specific. Richardson’s film is also, at this distance in time, a valuable period piece. Changing popular tastes of the time are reflected in the hugely varying numbers of people at the margins of the main action – the feeble audience in the theatre where Archie’s tacky revue is playing, the packed stands for the bathing beauty contest that he comperes.
Laurence Olivier’s appearance in the original Royal Court production of The Entertainer in 1957 was, at the time, a startling convergence of the British theatrical establishment and the new ‘radical’ drama pioneered by John Osborne and others. Archie Rice on screen is certainly one of the highest points of Olivier’s film career. In the first onstage sequence, Tony Richardson, intercuts between Archie in close-up and in much longer shot, making us aware of the difference between what we can see, and what the sparse turnout in the theatre stalls are seeing. For the latter, Archie is at the centre of, yet embedded in, a surrounding production whose slack mediocrity rhymes with his automatic, cheesy patter. For viewers of the film, however, Olivier’s face is an electrifying anticipation of Archie’s famous lines later on: ‘Look at these eyes. I’m dead – behind these eyes. I’m dead’. It’s the eyes above all, in stage make-up or out of it, which convey Archie’s contempt for himself and for his audience, though of course Olivier’s face isn’t the whole show. In his early fifties at the time, he’s strikingly loose-limbed, giving his character an extra snakelike quality. As for the voice: away from the theatre, in the fractious world of their rented rooms, Archie repeatedly tries to upstage the rest of his family and succeeds, thanks to Olivier’s repertoire of camp, sarcastic asides.
The star’s acrid dazzle is melded, to brilliant effect, with a quiet despair – and a suggestion that he keeps performing both to acknowledge and to suppress his sense of futility. This comes through especially strongly once Archie goes to bed with Tina Lapford (Shirley Anne Field), runner-up in the beauty contest. His seduction of Tina is meant to lead to seducing her wealthy father (Tony Longridge) into putting money into Archie’s next theatre venture. As Olivier plays it, he’s at once desperate for the cockeyed plan to succeed and aware from the start that it’s doomed to failure. There are fine scenes at this point in the story, between Archie and his daughter Jean (Joan Plowright), as well as with Tina.
I was briefly unsure about Olivier during Archie’s recollection to Jean of ‘the most moving thing I ever heard’. When his voice switches into sincerity, as he describes seeing and hearing an old black woman sing[1], Archie still sounds phony. On reflection, though, this makes sense. As soon as he embarks on the anecdote, Jean protests, ‘Oh, Dad …’ and Archie has to assure her, ‘No, no, it’s not a gag’. The impassioned falsity of Olivier’s reading of the monologue expresses the depths of Archie’s hollowness. Even those who find him a flamboyantly selfish and shallow performer (as I sometimes do) must admit, at the very least, that in The Entertainer the line between Olivier’s besetting vices as an actor and his character’s personal defects is fascinatingly blurred. His blending of Archie Rice’s appetite and jaded self-loathing is a masterpiece of film acting. He’s also very entertaining.
Brenda de Banzie, the only other member of the original stage cast in the film, is Phoebe, Archie’s second wife and a nagging, repetitious worrywart. I can usually resist this kind of character and the way it tends to be played (Margery Mason was an exemplary interpreter of the type on television in the 1960s and 1970s). There’s also a particular problem with it in a John Osborne piece: Phoebe may only be stepmother to Archie’s three children but she still comes in for Osborne’s trademark mother-phobic vitriol. Brenda de Banzie, however, works up a head of desperate, neurotic steam enough to transcend the conception of the role and to make the gin-sodden Phoebe sometimes very moving – for example, when she discovers that Archie’s father Billy (Roger Livesey) has helped himself to the fancy cake she’s bought, with cash borrowed from Jean, to celebrate Mick’s homecoming. Phoebe’s fury and Billy’s bafflement as to how his action could cause it make the moment powerfully distressing. Archie embodies the degeneration of vaudeville in contrast to Billy, who also trod the music hall boards. Kenneth Tynan, in his review of the 1957 stage production, described Billy as ‘stately and retired, represent[ing] Edwardian graciousness’. As interpreted by Roger Livesey, Billy is both a gent and a bore. Livesey uses his distinctive cracked voice to great effect to suggest something damaged by the passage of time.
Unfortunately, Billy is also crucial to a series of unconvincing scenes late on in the film. Although these describe events that aren’t a major departure from those of the play, the realisation of them is melodramatic (on stage, these events are reported rather than dramatised). Billy sabotages Archie’s affair with Tina, and thereby his hopes of funding for the new show, by telling her parents his son is a married man. Then, after Mick’s death and memorial service, Archie embarks on an attempt to revive his father’s stage career, in the hope of riding on its coattails to success of his own. It’s daftly incredible that a London impresario (Max Bacon) is prepared to invest in a show starring Billy, who, on opening night, collapses and dies in the wings, just before he’s due to go on. The succession of scenes that follows – Billy’s funeral and its aftermath – is weak. It dilutes the effect of what Tony Richardson might have achieved in the closing stages if he’d focused more exclusively on Archie, back on stage and singing ‘Why Should I Care?’ to an empty house.
Although The Entertainer, for the most part, outdoes Look Back in Anger in creating effective scenes in locations other than the central ones (the stage on which Archie performs and the Rices’ digs), the earlier film just occasionally has the edge in this. Whereas the jazz club opening of Look Back in Anger works well, The Entertainer’s sequences in London, where Jean Rice is working as an art teacher, are surplus to requirements. You get the feeling that time is spent describing the tensions between Jean and her fiancé Graham (Daniel Massey), who’s in line for a job abroad and wants her to leave England with him, largely in order to justify Jean’s return to her family for the rest of the film. The London scenes are also an early indication that Jean, for all that Richardson and Osborne treat her as a crucial figure, is one of The Entertainer‘s weaknesses. Intelligent and observant, she has a strong emotional attachment to her family even though she can see how dysfunctional it is. She’s recently taken part in a Trafalgar Square peace rally, protesting against the British military action in Suez, but Mick’s involvement naturally complicates the issue for her. If The Entertainer were a novel, Jean might work as the first-person narrator; on the screen, she never comes to life.
Even though Jean’s limitations as a character are largely the fault of others, an actress with greater emotional fluidity and more natural vulnerability than Joan Plowright might have made a difference. In nearly all other respects, what a supporting cast this was! Like Plowright, Albert Finney was making his film debut here (The Entertainer was released just three months before Saturday Night and Sunday Morning). As Mick, Finney is only on screen for a couple of minutes but he makes such an impression that thoughts of Mick stay with the viewer, as with his family, throughout – and give his tribulations in Egypt a poignant reality. The third important debutant is Alan Bates, as Archie’s other son, Frank, a jobbing piano player and backstage dogsbody at his father’s shows. Bates sensitively gives the impression of a man with plenty to say but who knows there’s no point trying to say it: he’ll not get a word in edgeways. Even though his scenes belong in a more conventional drama, Daniel Massey is good as Graham. Shirley Anne Field does well as Tina. Thora Hird’s portrait of Tina’s mother is wondrously complete and funny. The chair of the judges for the beauty contest, ‘well-known television personality MacDonald Hobley’, plays himself.
7 April 2018
[1] ‘It was when I was in Canada. I used to slip over the border sometimes. One night I heard some Negress singing in a bar. If ever I saw any hope or strength in the human race, it was in the face of that old fat Negress getting up to sing about … Jesus, or something like that. I never even liked that kind of music, but to see that old bag singing her heart out to the whole world … You knew somehow that it didn’t matter how much you kicked people, how much you despised them. If they can get up and make a pure, natural noise like that, there’s nothing wrong with them. If I’d done one thing as good as that in my whole life, I’d have been all right. I wish to God I was that old bag. I’d stand up and shake my great bosom up and down and lift up my head and make the most beautiful fuss in the world. Dear God, I would. But I’ll never do it.‘
