Archie Rice (Laurence Olivier) is a womanizing, bankrupt, washed-up comic who just wants one more shot to put on a great show. Too bad Archie’s in the dying music hall industry and his “great show” is a show no one wants.
Archie attempts to fund his new show through an affair with Tina (Shirley Anne Field), a younger woman whose parents want to pay for her entertainment career. Archie is laser-focused on restoring his fame, even as his creditors hound him, even when his son is killed during the Suez Crisis, even as his unfaithfulness to his wife drives her to noisy alcoholism, even after his retired showman father dies during a comeback Archie coerced him into.
The movie ends with Archie doing his tired schtick in a half-empty theater, and it’s surprisingly moving, despite Archie pretty clearly being the villain of the movie. He just can’t help himself. He’s the entertainer.
But it’s not just about one man; it’s about England. Director Tony Richardson said Archie was “the embodiment of a national mood […] Archie was the future, the decline, the sourness, the ashes of old glory, where Britain was heading.”
Rating: 6/10, RIP England.
Cast and Crew
The Entertainer was adapted from a work by playwright John Osborne. Osborne’s best known for his play “Look Back in Anger”1 and was one of the practitioners of kitchen sink realism. The playwrights working in this genre were often referred to as “angry young men,” since their work rejected light, escapist fare. Osborne and others, including Kingsley Amis, instead depicted the dire reality of working-class Britons living ordinary, desperate lives.2
Laurence Olivier, who we last saw in Richard III, starred in both the stage version of “The Entertainer” and in the film. Joan Plowright, who played Olivier’s character’s daughter in the film, married Olivier in 1961 (following the end of Olivier’s marriage to Vivien Leigh). We’ll see both Olivier and Plowright again in this column.
The Trivia
Archie’s son Mick (Albert Finney) is captured and killed during the Suez Canal Crisis, so let’s dive into what that kerfuffle was all about. It’ll require some history first.
The Suez Canal was opened in 18693 and was funded through a joint venture between the French and Egyptian governments. The one name you’ll hear associated with its development is that of French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps. The canal connects the Red Sea (at Suez) with the Mediterranean Sea (at Port Said) through the Isthmus of Suez.4 The opening of the canal meant boats would no longer have to go around the Cape of Good Hope to travel from Europe to Asia.
But the canal changed hands in 1882 when the British occupied Egypt.5 Later, the 1919 Egyptian Revolution against the British led to the creation of the Kingdom of Egypt under King Fuad in 1922, but even post-independence, Britain reserved four powers over Egypt: foreign relations, communications, the military, and Sudan. Because the Suez Canal related to those first three, the Brits maintained their control of it.
But Egyptian politics got wild in 1952, when another Egyptian Revolution overthrew King Farouk (Fuad’s son). First, Farouk was replaced by his son, an infant crowned Fuad II, but the baby’s regency council was controlled by the ringleaders of the coup, Mohamed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser. In 1953, the pretense was dropped, baby Fuad II was deposed (he probably didn’t even know what was going on), and Mohamed Naguib became the first president of the Republic of Egypt.6 Naguib ruled for a year and a half, until Nasser put him under house arrest and seized power.
Okay, enough prologue. In 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, ostensibly to help fund the Aswan High Dam.7 In response, the U.K., France, and Israel hatched a dastardly plan: Israel would first invade the Sinai Peninsula, and then the Brits and French, under the pretense of trying to end the conflict, would themselves invade Egypt. This plan would let them take back the canal and topple the Pan-Arabist Nasser, who threatened not just European control of the canal but any kind of European hegemony in the region.
This plan got U.K. prime minister Anthony Eden8 into hot water. The U.S. couldn’t support British meddling in Egypt while simultaneously denouncing Russian meddling in Hungary, so they cut off British and French access to IMF funds. The United Nations put together the first-ever United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) to deal with the Suez Crisis; it managed a cease-fire and Lester Pearson won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on it.9 Eden resigned after the Suez Crisis and was replaced by Harold MacMillan, while Nasser’s power continued to grow in the region.
You thought the Trivia section in a movie called The Entertainer would be light and airy? Nope.
Odds and Ends
Albert Finney had his debut film role in The Entertainer…Dubonnet is a sweet fortified wine10 that was Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite drink…“The Entertainer” is a famous 1902 rag by Scott Joplin.
A postscript: the Egyptian people have never forgotten the U.S. support for them during the Suez Crisis. Here’s Eisenhower and Nasser having a laugh about it.
“Look Back in Anger” was adapted by director Tony Richardson into a 1959 film and apparently did not lend its name to the Oasis song “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” As mentioned, Tony Richardson was also tapped for the film adaptation of “The Entertainer.” You should know Richardson was Vanessa Redgrave’s husband and that their daughter Natasha Richardson was an actress married to Liam Neeson.
The name came from a 1954 article about the visual art style that said it “takes us back from the studio to the kitchen” and included as subjects “everything but the kitchen sink – the kitchen sink too.”
Interestingly, the same year as the American transcontinental railroad.
The Isthmus of Suez is the sole land bridge between Africa and Asia. The Wikipedia on transcontinental countries is a good read, but as a reductive TL;DR, the countries that span transcontinental boundaries contiguously are Egypt, Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Colombia/Panama (depending on where you draw the border between North and South America).
Initially, the French owned 52% of the shares of the canal while Egypt’s Khedive held 44%. The Egyptian shares were sold to Britain in 1875, and a desire to protect this British investment was part of the justification for Britain’s invasion of Egypt. (Note that the British didn’t annex Egypt—it remained nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, though in practice, Egypt was ruled by the British.)
This Economist article (paywalled) suggests that disillusionment with the current president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, is so high that some would welcome the 72-year-old no-longer-a-baby Fuad II back to be king. (Though it also suggests other potential leaders: Gamal Mubarak, son of the president ousted in 2011; jailed Islamist Hazem Abu Ismail; and Mo Salah, a Liverpool soccer star.)
He also blockaded the Straits of Tiran, which connect the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba.
Eden’s term came after Churchill’s second go-around as PM.
The flavor comes from the bark of the Cinchona tree. Because the bark of these trees carried quinine, which has antimalarial properties, they were called “fever trees,” and you may recognize Fever-Tree as a modern brand of tonic.