n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

barefoot-gal from United States gave a spot on review of this allegorical film. Yes, it represented the decline of the British Empire after WW2. The Egyptians had just dared to thumb their noses at Great Britain by seizing the Suez Canal, and thus showed them that the Empire was finished. Other colonies were not far behind in defying the country which they felt had exploited them for so long, for which they had no loyalty. By using the dysfunctional impoverished Rice family as a metaphor, the film showed the end of an era as the once immensely popular music hall was grinding to a halt in run down theaters in seedy seaside towns, themselves coming to the end of their hey-day as package holidays to the Mediterranean were becoming popular and affordable. Entertainment by fading vaudevillians which which would have appealed to a captive audience of servicemen and people who could not go abroad in war time no longer had appeal. The audience wanted something new. The audience had no loyalty to a form of entertainment which had held a monopoly until alternatives arrived, just as today's audiences have deserted the cinema for TV, and now are deserting TV for DVD's and Internet downloads. Supermarket checkouts have replaced individual service in groceries, and on line retailing is replacing department stores. Why should they care? Those who cannot adapt, perish.Archie Rice is the son of a popular music hall star of the Edwardian era, without his talent; nevertheless, it is the only life he knows and he is trying to make a living for himself and his family. We see this many times as the son of a star, with Jr. tacked on to the famous name, tries and fails to follow in his father's footsteps and cash in on his name, but there is only room for one. Archie Rice knows that he will never make it, but he has to go on as it is all he knows. As barefoot-gal noted, we are still seeing this today as proud occupations are superseded by a new technology and the skilled worker becomes obsolete.Archie makes a desperate attempt to raise money for a new show and make himself feel he still has what it takes by seducing a beauty contest runner up whose affluent mother will put up the money in return for a role for her daughter. We never see whether she is anything more than a pretty face awed by a whiff of show biz.Had Archie been born 20 years earlier he may well have made a good living on the halls performing the same act week after week for years as he travelled around the provinces, but there is little demand for live entertainment and millions of people are seeing a variety act at once via TV. Times are changing and he either gives in, or just goes on day after day putting one foot in front of the other and trying to hold it all together. This is a film which is uncomfortable to watch, but makes the viewer think and remember for a long, long, time. Someone referred to it as a Greek Tragedy, and I would agree.

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.

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."

Laurence Oliver, (Archie Rice) gave an outstanding performance as a washed up Comedian in the theater, however, he did attract old timers in England who remembered his great acts years and years ago. This film is something like, "Sunset Blvd.", with Gloria Swanson, who tries to make a come back on the stage and practically starves to death trying. Brenda DeBomzie, (Phoebe Rice), plays his daughter who adores her father and knows him like a book, especially when he drinks too much and starts going to bed with a girl just turned twenty (20) years of age. Poor Archie never seems to give up on the idea of still making it big on the British stage, however, his family want him to go to Canada and give the entire entertaining business a fair goodbye. Laurence Oliver was asked which film was his best and he thought this film was more like what Laurence Oliver really was as a person deep down in his very soul.