The Entertainer

Tony Richardson's 1960 film adapts John Osborne's play, with Laurence Olivier carrying to the screen the role he had played on stage. Archie Rice is a music hall comic nobody wants any more; he works shrinking seaside theatres, runs up debts, lies to his family and believes the next show will save him. Behind it stand the Suez crisis and a country losing its empire, and Archie's collapse is deliberately laid over that national decline. Olivier, known for classical theatre acting, works here in an entirely different register and never makes the man likeable. It is counted among the founding films of the British New Wave. Joan Plowright and a young Alan Bates are also in the cast. Who it's for: viewers who want British social realism and Olivier in an unfamiliar mode. Who it's not for: anyone wanting a sympathetic protagonist and a story of redemption; Archie learns nothing.