Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Mischa Redfern I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Orla Zuniga It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Prismark10 Laurence Olivier reinvented himself in The Entertainer and set to work with the angry young turks of British theatre and film. A new generation of talent like John Osbourne and Tony Richardson who would had regarded Olivier as yesterday's man as this film introduces Albert Finney and Alan Bates, the next generation of great actors.Legend has it that Olivier initially dismissed the new generation of left wing playwrights that emerged in the 1950s. When Olivier was directing The Prince and the Showgirl, Arthur Miller then married to Marilyn Monroe showed up in London and wanted to see the plays by these young up and coming talent. Olivier accompanied Miller to the theatre and after the show asked Osbourne to write something for him, the result was The Entertainer.Olivier plays washed up music hall comedian Archie Rice. He was never as funny as his father. He has evaded paying his taxes for twenty years, an undischarged bankrupt who has not paid his co-workers and worse of all, he is not making his audience laugh.Set during the time of the Suez crisis, the moment Britain realised they were no longer a world power. Archie's son who is in the army is kidnapped out in Egypt. He is in a loveless marriage with second wife Phoebe and as ever he has a wandering eye and at the moment shacked up with the runner up of the Miss Great Britain contest. Archie hopes her family will bankroll his next production.Archie's family wants him to move to Canada to start a new life in the hotel business, but Archie clings on to that next big break that will never come his way. Like Britain, Archie is decaying and in decline, unable to afford the bills.The film has an outstanding performance from Olivier. Despite the plaudits and the Oscar, Olivier knows he is fighting for his legacy by showing the new generation that he still has what it takes to blow everyone off the screen. The film was shot on location Morecambe and Blackpool, two seaside resorts in Lancashire that were still experiencing the glory days in the early 1960s when this film was made. I used to work near the Winter Gardens in Blackpool in the late 1990s, at which time the resort were experiencing mainly day visitors and some of the old backstreet hotels were now residences for people on social security. At least it was in better shape than Morecambe, an area my work also covered. That was in need of the last rites.

writers_reign It's interesting that some 70/80% of the reviews I've read here on IMDb were posted by Americans who may or may not subscribe to the view that The Entertainer is a metaphor for a once-great Empire slipping gradually off the world stage. The fact that they are American may account for the fact they fail to mention the ultimate irony that John Osborne, the original 'Angry Young Man' and iconoclast extraordinary to the house of Middle Class England became himself eventually a fully paid-up member of the Establishment. As someone who has always found Olivier as overrated an actor as Hitchcock is a director, and not fit to unscrew the top off Michael Redgrave's tube of Leichner No.5 I endured rather than enjoyed his mannered performance - even John Slater in a touring production of the play equalled if not eclipsed Olivier - and found the entire cast ho hum.

calvinnme 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.

Robert J. Maxwell Olivier is Archie Rice, an obsolescent music hall singer, comic, and promoter, in Blackpool, a relatively elaborate resort town on the Irish Sea. There's an amusement park, a pier, caravans, thrilling rides, a ferris wheel, and the modest apartment in which Olivier lives with his alcoholic wife, Brenda De Banzie, his retired music-hall performer father, and his three children, one of whom, Albert Finney, is in the army and being shipped off to possible combat in the Suez. (This is 1956.) The gaiety of the resort is mostly fake from the point of view of Olivier's family. He hasn't paid his income tax for twenty years and the feds are after him, so he's desperate for money. His own show at the music hall is ailing. It looks like the kind of production that might have been popular thirty years earlier. The skimpy audiences simply sit and stare. One of the audience remarks, "Does he think he's funny?" Well, yes, he does. Olivier is hardly ever "off", as they say. Like his ancient and good-natured Dad, he loves to tell stories, half of them made up, and make wisecracks that don't quite hit the mark. Olivier's performance -- in distinct contrast to Archie Rice's -- is unimpeachable. He has every move, every glance, down pat. He seems always to be in motion, darting here and there, cackling at his own wit, except when he's coolly calculating how to make enough money to pull him out of the hole he and his family are in.He believes he's found it when he serves as a judge at a beauty contest, leaping up and down, yelling WHOO HOO into the microphone as the half-naked babes parade past. He seduces the runner-up, the yummy Shirley Anne Field, and discovers that her parents are interested, a little, in investing in Olivier's new show. He's given them the impression that he's a big shot.I really didn't care much for the structure of the film. John Osborne must not have been a very happy camper. Everything that could go wrong in Olivier's life DOES in fact go wrong, a rhopalic series of disasters. The odd, tiny bubbles of happiness or satisfaction soon pop. I swear, the single unalloyedly good thing that happens to him is that he gets to spend an afternoon rolling around in the sack with Shirley Anne Field, who is half his age. A little gratuitous nudity in this scene might have lent some uplift to the movie but we have to settle for her snapping her knickers, as the Brits call them, back on after the debauch.This lacuna will leave some viewers feeling less fulfilled then they might have felt, but that's nothing compared to what Olivier's character goes through. I won't spell it all out but Murphy's law applies.Nevertheless, I mentioned Olivier's performance because it's so finely tuned -- but then everybody is quite good. I suppose the delectable Shirley Anne Field gives the weakest performance but there is pathos in every character, whether they know it or not.The main problem is that everything in Osborne's story seems so thoroughly desperate beneath the masks of comedy. One bad thing after another. Cripes, if I wanted tragedy I'd watch Olivier's "Othello." Not that the downbeat ending bothers Olivier much, or at least it doesn't appear to, because he sloughs it off with another would-be funny apothegm.I wouldn't watch it too often. Not if there were any razor blades about.