CinemaLit: The Entertainer(1960)

February 10 – The Entertainer, 1960, 96 minutes, directed by Tony Richardson starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright and Albert Finney

The Entertainer has a few key things in common with Look Back in Anger – both are British New Wave standards directed by Tony Richardson from a source play by John Osborne. The entertainer is Archie Rice – a third-rate song and dance man in a seaside town who's moldering under heavy debt, a fading act, and crumbling family. Laurence Olivier, often hailed as the greatest actor of his generation, delivers a monumental performance as something he's not: a talentless and delusional man. Not one but three important actors make their film debuts here – Alan Bates, Joan Plowright, and Albert Finney.

CinemaLit February 2023: The British New Wave

As the Mostly British Film Festival plays the Vogue Theatre this month in San Francisco, CinemaLit is screening four great films of the British New Wave: Look Back in Anger (1959), The Entertainer (1960), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). From 1959 to 1963, British cinema came forth with a series of startlingly raw films portraying the struggles of the laboring classes in the Midlands and Northern England. Spare, diamond-hard, and deeply felt, these "kitchen sink dramas" were made on small budgets and directed by mavericks just beginning their careers, including Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz, John Schlesinger, and Bryan Forbes. The films hold up brilliantly sixty years later; their harsh judgments of wealth and social class haven't aged a day. Revel, too, in the powerhouse acting of four actors at the peak of their powers: Richard Burton (Look Back in Anger), Laurence Olivier (The Entertainer), Albert Finney (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), and Tom Courtney (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner). Combined, they embody the dispossessed and embittered forgotten men of austere postwar England as envisioned by John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, Shelagh Delaney, and other screenwriters, novelists, and playwrights of the era.

Host or Publisher Mechanics' Institute