Alan Jackson Video:

		List Price: $14.98		Label: MGM (Video & DVD) Salesrank: 55690 Released: June 19, 2001
		Our Price: $2.89
		Used Price: $2.00
		MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated) Media: DVD

Editorial Review:
Screen legend Laurence Olivier (Wuthering Heights) delivers an OscarÂ(r)-nominated*,"smashing performance" (Time) in this riveting film that brought him his "greatest contemporary role" (Pauline Kael). Co-starring Albert Finney and Alan Bates (in their screen debuts), this powerful, thought-provoking and vividly theatrical film, true to its name, is supremely entertaining. Career first. Everything else second. According to vaudevillian Archie Rice, the show must go oneven if it means stringing along his fellow performers, exploiting the hopes and money of a starlet and neglecting his own family. This is Archie's world but not everyone wants to live in it. His only daughter (Joan Plowright) will do everything she can to break through and bring him around if only she can make him listen. *1960: Actor

Description of The Entertainer:
Laurence Olivier broke with the theatrical poise of previous roles to play seedy music-hall entertainer Archie Rice in John Osborne's acclaimed play, The Entertainer, reprising the role in Tony Richardson's 1960 screen version and earning an Oscar nomination for his performance. Olivier gives his all as the gap-toothed vaudevillian living in the shadow of his music-hall-legend father Billy Rice (Roger Livesey), spitting out pithy wisecracks and mugging pathetically for bored audiences in seaside dives. Under the life-of-the-party patter, however, is a pathetic music-hall dinosaur trying too hard for his moment in the spotlight, nursing his wounded humiliation in trysts with naïve young girls and pouring out his passion in his finale tune, "Why Should I Care." "I have an affinity with Archie Rice," Olivier once opined. "It's what I really am. I'm not like Hamlet."

Shot on location on the boardwalk carnivals and holiday camps of the British seaside, the shabby show-biz world is beautifully photographed but never quite shakes off its origins on the stage. It's the vivid performances that drive the drama: Joan Plowright (who married Olivier in 1961) as his pragmatic daughter; Alan Bates and Albert Finney (making their film debuts) as his sons, a next-generation show-biz hustler and a soldier shipped off to the Suez, respectively; and Brenda de Banzie as Archie's long-suffering wife. "You've been a good audience. Let me know where you're playing tomorrow and I'll come see you." --Sean Axmaker

The Entertainer Reviews:
Top-notch kitchen sink drama
2008-12-08 - The demise of a seedy music hall entertainer is a metaphor for the decline of post-War Britain. A real showcase for Olivier - this rejuvenated his career. Beautifully photographed and strikingly directed with carefully framed scenes sometimes including both foreground and background action - also features excellent use of sound. Interestingly Olivier married his young co-star Plowright soon after this film was made.

Great, somewhat neglected film, with superb Olivier performance
2008-01-11 - Laurence Olivier stars as a sleazy, third-rate music hall performer in 1960's "The Entertainer", one of the first and best films of the so called Free Cinema movement, and a movie that is somewhat neglected today (it should be better known). Based on a play by John Osborne, Olivier plays Archie Rice, a mediocre performer in grim seaside town theaters. His shows attract few people (early in the film, we see passersby sneering at the theater marquee that falsely advertises Archie as a television comedian). His father, Billy, was once a talented and successful comedian, but now he is just a cranky old man living with him and Archie's wife, the unstable Phoebe. Archie has three grown children, played respectively by Alan Bates, Albert Finney and Joan Plowright, all very early in their careers. Jean (Plowright, who would become Olivier's wife soon after this film) comes to home from London and sees her family unraveling: one of her brothers have been sent to Suez, her stepmother is becoming more and more unstable, Archie is hounded by his creditors while he imprudently starts a romance with a beauty contestant, with the hope of obtaining financing for his shows from her rich parents. The film goes downhill from here, so is quite bleak, but it is very well done (and especially, performed). Some critics see Archie as a metaphor of postwar England, and this may indeed have been Osborne's intention, but the film plays better as a character study of a very flawed man.

Great Early Olivier Film
2007-07-06 - Sir Laurence Olivier performs 'Brilliantly', the role of Archie, "The Entertainer"! The cast including his future wife, Joan Plowwright, and Alan Bates, are equally 'Superb' in their roles. Thank You for this 'Wonderful Film'!

The Entertainer
2007-06-28 - Ironically the foremost symbol of traditional English theatre, Olivier showed off his astounding range with an anti-heroic, tour-de-force turn in Tony Richardson's 1960 drama, adapted from John Osborne's play. Reprising his celebrated stage role, Sir Larry has a field-day playing Rice, a somewhat ghoulish has-been who personifies his own nation's decay, and the effort earned him an Oscar nomination. De Banzie and newcomer Plowright (who'd go on to marry Olivier) excel in supporting roles.

the show must go on
2007-03-04 - this is one of the great treasures of my collection... 'the entertainer' features Laurence olivier in perhaps his greatest screen performance as the detestable, washed up vaudevilian Archie Rice who just can't give up the stage.. It is, moreover, the portrait of a family that struggles to survive in post world war 2 england.. With a son off in the military, a slightly senile yet amiable old grandfather, his son the not so sly womanizer archie rice, archie's much neglected wife, and the daughter played by joan plowright in her first screen performance.. This is a movie which you will never forget... Olivier plays archie as a al jolson wannabe who is so addicted to his profession and young women that he neglects his family - yet in the end you cannot help but sympathise with his character who you know really does care a great deal...