The Entertainer (1960)

The Entertainer (Tony Richardson, 1960) One thing about Laurence Olivier, he was an actor for all genres. Yes, he was primarily known as a stage and film Shakespearean, probably the greatest, but he also did light comedies, thrillers, period dramas, horror films, the occasional cheese-fest...everything...including the kitchen sink. Kitchen sink dramas, that is. 

In My Week With Marilyn—the fictionalized telling of the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl—Kenneth Branagh's Olivier announces he's done with directing (after his on-set tussles with Monroe and finding out she's incandescent on-screen, anyway, despite his direction) and is going back to the stage to do a John Osbourne piece. That would be "The Entertainer," the play on which this film is based. On stage, it vacillated between life on-stage for Archie Rice (Olivier), and at home, where...well, he's never really OFF-stage, a needy vaudevillian with an alcoholic second wife (Brenda De Banzie), three kids (>Albert Finney, Alan Bates, and Joan Plowright—who would become the last Lady Olivier), and a slightly more talented, but no more wiser live-in Da (Roger Livesey).

For now, Archie is scraping by, as star/producer of a boardwalk diversion at a seaside holiday camp, in the perfect venue—an old, faded theater, where the air is as stale as his material. His day is only vital in the afternoons and early evenings in the bustling chaos of on-stage and backstage. The rest is the hummest of drums—wife in her cups, son off to war in the Suez, youngest son helping Dad in the dive, and daughter teaches art to a bunch of barely interested teddy-boys and girls. She goes to the seaside, seeking out Father, looking for some form of stability before settling into a perfunctory marriage.

She should have gone somewhere else. Archie is only accessible on-stage, and when off, he's trying to hustle another season, another venue, another donor, another prospective starlet. Life just isn't good enough for him if a limelight isn't on him and the money's starting to run out to pay the electric bill. Much was made of the play as a comment for the fading empiricism of Great Britain, as personified by the propped-up jolly-good Archie, for whom the show must go on, despite not having any juice in it for years, surviving with a heavy layer of rouge and grease-paint to give the long-distance impression of vitality and youth, blithely ignoring the march of time and pasting it over with the false grin of performance, no matter how desperate it may come across.

Richardson's film opens the play up, puts instance on Archie's transgressions on-screen instead of just being talked about and blubbered over, and Olivier sticks out like a sore thumb—rightly so—apart from the rest of the cast. Where Livesey is old-school formal and the kids are new-broom casual, Olivier sticks to his guns with a theatrical performance which feels appropriately, desperately false, which benefits the film while also making the character of Archie a complete outsider, a role he no doubt relishes. There's only one star in this "revue," everybody else is a bit player. 

For Olivier, it must have fulfilled some need—to slum, maybe, or to reach out to the new material being generated by Osbourne, Richardson and others in the new school of British rebellion. Maybe, after his long string of kings, princes and noblemen, he wanted to explore the has-been's and ignoble men, to cultivate portraits of characters of a more stratified than rarefied stripe. There's also an element that Olivier might have been familiar with—the performer's ennui, bordering on contempt for his audience. 

At this stage in his career, Archie is performing for himself—the money's not great, the material stale, and any creative collaboration is non-existent—the most intimate relationship he has is with his make-up mirror and even that is betraying him. Olivier is not above showing bitterness—he was particularly adept at tartly spitting out the ironic put-down in the guise of civility. And he was acknowledging his age (he was a very old Hamlet in his film of it) and the potential for failure, by portraying it, challenging it, mocking it, waving a red cape at it, maybe exorcising it.  It was a brave interesting role for Britain's leading thespian.

Olivier as Archie Rice: "The Roar of the Greasepaint"

The Loved One

The Loved One (Tony Richardson, 1965)  Director Tony Richardson "does" Hollywood, and it ain't pretty.  There are lots of Tinsel Town screeds out there, mostly about personal mania (Sunset Boulevard, What Makes Sammy Run?), but few—like Day of the Locust—where the craziness seems endemic to the region and its excesses. The Loved One has an air of pretense with sanctimonious chortling while it shoots its fish in a barrel, casting the film with "types"—Liberace as a coffin salesman, Milton Berle as a crass businessman—that might be a little too leaden in its intent.

Flush from his success with the multi-Oscar-winning Tom Jones, after toiling away over in the British "kitchen-sink" industry, Richardson returned to black and white cinematography (by Haskell Wexler) in an adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel adapted by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood. Waugh's book was inspired by a disappointing trip to Hollywood on the pretense of making a film of "Brideshead Revisited," and his twining of the film industry with the funeral business has a natural feel to it, as both have a lot to do with presentation, and the construction of artifice, all in the name of comfort (while robbing money blind).  

But that was in the 40's.  The film was made in the early 60's on the cusp of "mod" and in the nuclear shadow of Dr. Strangelove. Both films have that Southern exposure in common, but where Kubrick made his film with a gargoylishly straight face, Richardson can't help gilding the mourning lily.

Poet Dennis Barlow (Robert Morse, post-dubbed with a wavering British accent) wins a literary competition, the first prize being a trip to Hollywood, where he stays with his uncle, Sir Francis Hinsley (John Gielgud) who works at a film studio. Hinsley is soon fired by the studio's boss DJ, jr. (Roddy McDowell) and commits suicide. The British community (led by Robert Morley) insists that Hinsley's funeral be as grand as possible, bankrupting the old man's estate, and forcing Barlow to stay in Hollywood and taking a job at a pet cemetery run by Henry Glenworthy (Jonathan Winters), whose brother, the Reverend Wilbur Glenworthy (also Jonathan Winters) runs the Whispering Glades cemetery and mortuary, the establishment handling Hinsley's solemnities. There, Barlow meets Aimee Thanatogenous (Anjanette Comer), a corpse beautician and Mr. Joyboy (Rod Steiger), the Whispering Glades embalmer, who competes with Barlow for her affections.  

There is a lot of brilliant stuff here: a sequence at another chapel has a wedding (ministered by Ed—the original "You're in good hands with Allstate" announcer—Reimers) that is run like a television production, so that everyone can be ushered out, and the next scheduled funeral ushered in; the "keeping up appearances" haranguing of the British enclave in Hollywood; Jonathan Winters, not really given free rein to his inner demons in the roles, but showing how he might have been our Peter Sellers; and (okay) Liberace as a coffin salesman, there's something utterly apropos about that; a visit to Ms. Thanatagenous' under-construction cliff-house that is constantly rumbling with the threat of sliding to the highway below (a nice visual representation of her fragile doe-eyed innocence); Lionel Stander as newspaper advice columnist Guru Brahmin—a study in contrasts; the creepily loving reverence of the Whispering Glades workers for "the loved ones," as opposed to how the stiff pets at the pet cemetery are tossed into a freezer.

It's all very ghoulish and naughty (even flirting with pornography towards the end, discretely edited by Hal Ashby) but something of a misfire in its presentation. Morse is energetic and fun (and he has the teeth to play British), but in the same way The Wrong Box has the timing wrong to evoke humor, The Loved One never quite convinces you that you're supposed to be laughing, even guiltily. Instead, it has the air of stuffy indignation even as it's trying to regale. One can sympathize with the sentiments, but one wishes it was done better, less fire and more mockery. What's the quote? "There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view I hold dear."