Tag: Shirley Anne Field

The Entertainer (1960)

Laurence Olivier excels as a faded music hall star in The Entertainer

Director: Tony Richardson

Cast: Laurence Olivier (Archie Rice), Brenda de Banzie (Phoebe Rice), Roger Livesey (Billy Rice), Joan Plowright (Jean Rice), Alan Bates (Frank Rice), Daniel Massey (Graham), Shirley Anne Field (Tina Lapford), Thora Hird (Mrs Lapford), Albert Finney (Mick Rice)

In the late 1950s Laurence Olivier was worried about his career. While he was still doing Shakespeare and Coward comedies (intermixed with the odd film), the world of acting and theatre was moving on. Not least as John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was taking the West End by storm. Olivier seemed the polar opposite of the “Angry Young Men” of British theatre, a dusty relic. So Olivier changed gears – and his entire life – by asking to be cast in the lead role of Osborne’s next play The Entertainer. Olivier’s sensational stage performance – captured here on film – radically changed the path of both his career and his life, with his long-troubled marriage to Vivien Leigh broking down during it. But he also cemented himself as the leading British actor.

Olivier plays Archie Rice, a failing never-has-been end-of-pier comedy performer at an unnamed Seaside town in 1956. Rice’s routines are old-and-tired, his comedy tinged with desperation and he’s all but broke. Archie’s audiences are tired, bored and unamused. His home life, with his faded former beauty champ wife (Brenda de Banzie) is on the ropes due to his constant infidelity. His father (Roger Livesey) – a music hall celebrity with real talent – loves him but thinks he’s a disasater waiting to happen. His son Frank (Alan Bates) adores him but his daughter Jean (Joan Plowright) is more realistic. Archie through continues to peddle the idea of a success being round the corner, trying to put together a hit revue starring his latest mistress (Shirley Anne Field) and funded by her parents. Things will not end well.

The Entertainer’s main claim to historical note is that it captures that sensational stage performance of Laurence Olivier in the lead role. Olivier had always liked to claim that, with a few zigs and zags in his career, he would have become a third-rate comedian. His performance – with its ingratiating patter, it’s seedy sexually ambivalent campness, his selfishness and self-obsession and greed – is brilliant. Archie’s entire life is a desperate struggle to get himself the career he wants – while trying to shut his eyes to his own lack of talent (of which he is painfully aware). Olivier captures superbly not only the front of a man bent on self-promotion, but also the dead-eyed horror of a man who is aware all the time that he is dying inside.

Olivier’s eyes are drill-holes of death, and his life is an exhibition of selfish patter, with a constant sense of performance in every inch of Archie’s life. He’s a run-down, finished and disillusioned man trying to pluck what few moments of pleasure he can from a life he is only going through the motions in. All of it covered with a coating of self-delusion that quickly crumbles into sweaty desperation. While the film can only give a taste of the Olivier stage performance, it re-enforces Olivier’s energy, creativity and bravery. Olivier’s both bravura and tragically tired music hall performances alone are worth the price of admission.

Away from Olivier’s exceptional capturing of the washed up patter of the sleazy loser, it’s easy to overlook most of the rest of the film. But it’s directed with a kitchen-sink freshness by Tony Richardson, who brilliantly captures the faded grandeur and grubby failure of a failing seaside resort. Osborne’s play used the decline of music hall as a metaphor for the decline of the British Empire and while the film (for all its Suez references) doesn’t quite convey this, favouring instead domestic tragedy, it still perfectly captures the crumbling world of Rice and his ilk. Rice’s father – Roger Livesey, excellent and about a year older than Olivier – is a relic of the success of this era, and still carries some of its glamour, but still lives as a virtual tenant in the Rice home, eating spare cake where he can.

While the film is dominated by Olivier, this presentation of the play as a domestic tragedy works rather well. Brenda de Banzie (also reprising her role from stage) is very good as an ex-glamour puss (and former mistress of Archie) now turned into a faded, depressed matron, drunkenly bitter about what her life has (not) led to. Joan Plowright is excellent as the knowing daughter, alternately sympathetic and appalled at her father. Shirley Anne Field’s naïve lover is suitably naïve, under the control of her battleaxe mother, well played by Thora Hird. The cast is rounded out with Alan Bates and Albert Finney (both in debuts) as Archie’s sons.

While the film feels a little overlong at times, and is perhaps too much in thrall to Olivier, it offers a neat kitchen-sink view of failure and corruption in British life of the 1950s. There is, of course, no hope and no second chances here. Only the long, wearying decline and rotting as Archie’s life disintegrates under pressure and his own incompetent self-delusion. 

Alfie (1966)


Michael Caine excels as amoral cockney moralist lothario Alfie

Director: Lewis Gilbert

Cast: Michael Caine (Alfie), Shelley Winters (Ruby), Millicent Martin (Siddie), Julia Foster (Gilda), Jane Asher (Annie), Shirley Anne Field (Carla), Vivien Merchant (Lily), Eleanor Bron (Doctor), Denholm Elliott (Abortionist), Alfie Bass (Harry), Murray Melvin (Nat)

Is there a more “swinging Sixties” film than Alfie – the story of a cockney wideboy interested only in “birds” and having a good time? On the surface it captures the attitude of the 1960s, with free love, thumbing your nose at authority, and having the sort of fun the wartime generation frowned on. But it’s a more interesting film than this, which criticises the emptiness of the 1960s by showing us Alfie’s selfishness and loneliness. Sure he has a good time now and again – but would anyone really want to live like this forever?

Alfie (Michael Caine) is a handsome chauffeur with a never-ending stream of affairs, commitment constantly avoided. The film follows these entanglements, starting with his needy girlfriend Gilda (Julia Foster), the mother of his child, whom he constantly cheats on. When Gilda finally leaves him – and Alfie loses touch with the son he has become fond of – a medical condition ends up with him in a convalescent home, where his affairs include the wife of a fellow patient, Lily (Vivien Merchant). Later relationships with a young hitchhiker (Jane Asher) and a rich American woman (Shelley Winters) similarly lead to disappointment.

The main thing that makes Alfie last (possibly the only thing) is Michael Caine’s sublime performance. Caine is on screen the whole time, and the film is spotted throughout with his casual direct-to-camera addresses. Caine’s charm and likeability work perfectly for this device, winning the audience over. But Caine never falls for Alfie – even if many audience members clearly did. Caine’s constantly demonstrates Alfie’s hypocrisy, shallowness, meanness and selfishness. Sure he recounts his actions with wit, but most of these actions are extremely shitty. But right from the start there is a charismatic, lothario swagger to him – and a cheeky charm – that makes you like him.

But his general shittiness is more obvious today than back in the 1960s. Then the amount of sex probably shocked viewers the most. Today it’s Alfie’s inability in to refer to women as anything but “it”, like some smooth Richard Keys. His attitude to women is appalling – he describes Jane Asher’s hitchhiker like some sort of floor-cleaning, bed-sharing car. Alfie avoids any sort of emotional connection at all with his conquests, and the film makes clear that this has left him empty and lonely, feelings he buries deep down.

In fact, the film is most telling at the moments when Alfie doesn’t turn to us with that confident grin and place a self-serving spin on what just happened. Seeing his son being warmly embraced by Gilda’s new husband (at the christening of their new child), Alfie can only skulk quietly at the back of the church – as scared to meet our eyes as he is those of this family he could have had. His love for his son is something Alfie refuses to accept himself – but his feelings are all too clear at his physical collapse on losing access to his child, and his later tear-stained reaction to Lily’s abortion.

Ah yes the abortion scene. Probably the highlight of the film – if only because its intense seriousness is so different from the rest of the film, and Alfie’s wheedling weakness and whiny self-justification become all the clearer. His complete lack of principle in sleeping with his only friend’s wife (“Well what harm can it do?”) of course results in her pregnancy. And Alfie is all at sea, firstly with Vivien Merchant’s expert portrayal of distress, pain, shame and guilt as Lily – and with Denholm Elliot’s perfect cameo of grimy, resentful disillusionment as a struck-off doctor turned back-street abortionist. Just to bang the nail on the head, Alfie leaves Lily alone after the operation (telling the audience that there’s nothing he can do anyway, right?). He may be horrified later at what he has done, and may feel moments of empathy – but has he really learned anything?

The film is full of these moments where we are invited to understand that Alfie is not leading a life for us to aspire to, but one we need to avoid. It’s left Alfie alone, miserable and abandoned. For all the jaunty 1960s vibe, and Alfie’s charming cheek, he’s not a happy man but a desperately shallow one. And he’s even got a shelf life for this way of life: “He’s younger than you are” one of his lovers tells him late in the film, as she leaves him. Because what has Alfie got in his life? When he runs through a checklist in the film’s closing monologue (“a bob or two, some decent clothes, a car. I’ve got my health back and I ain’t attached. But I ain’t got my peace of mind”) the emptiness of his life is all too clear.

Caine’s brilliance is to make this tragic, empty, selfish man seem attractive and exciting – while also never losing sight of what a complete shit he is. It’s a great performance and he dominates the entire film. He plugs perfectly into the hip, light touch that Lewis Gilbert directs the film with, and the entire film has a layer of cool on it that works rather well. What makes the film last today though is its shrewd analysis of the empty, soulless, coldness that underpins living your life like this – and how the sort of shallow, no consequences, no emotional investment bouncing around Alfie has just leaves you alone and growing old.

“What’s it all about?” You can argue the answers are buried in this film – but Alfie never spots them.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960)


Albert Finney is an angry young man out for himself in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Director: Karel Reisz

Cast: Albert Finney (Arthur Seaton), Shirley Anne Field (Doreen), Rachel Roberts (Brenda), Hylda Baker (Aunt Ada), Norman Rossington (Bert), Bryan Pringle (Jack), Edna Morris (Mrs Bull), Elsie Wagstaff (Mrs Seaton), Fran Pettitt (Mr Seaton)

Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not because they don’t know a bloody thing about me! … What I’m out for is a good time – all the rest is propaganda. – Arthur Seaton

The 1960s saw a cultural shift in British cinema. Prior to this, most British films were either Ealing-style comedies or dramas focused on the middle or upper classes. When the working classes did appear, they were usually scamps or “ever so ‘umble”. This all changed in the 1960s with the emergence of “kitchen sink” dramas. The New Wave of British Cinema had arrived – films that looked at the real lives and issues of the working classes, that dared to present the working man (and it generally was men) as a living, breathing human being (warts and all) rather than some sort of latter-day Shakespearean comic turn.

Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) is a skilled, well-paid worker in a bicycle factory in Nottingham. He’s also your quintessential “angry young man”, contemptuous of his fellow workers, adamantly opposed to being told what to do with his life and only interested in a hedonistic life where he does whatever he wants. As Arthur begins a relationship with aspirant young woman Doreen (Shirley Anne Field), his life is complicated by the wife of a fellow worker, Brenda (Rachel Roberts), whom he’s sleeping with, announcing she’s pregnant.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning caused such a sensation when it was released. But it’s such a strong capturing of a particular time and moment that it’s hard to look at it today without seeing it as a little bit dated, or finding it hard to work out what all the fuss was about. But Arthur Seaton seemed to capture the mood of generation – and that’s a credit to Alan Sillitoe’s excellent (semi-autobiographical) script, based on his own novel.

Albert Finney gives the part a forceful, primal aggression that seems to capture the spirit of the age. He constantly bubbles with ill-directed resentment, mixed with cynicism and a beery oafishness. He isn’t a “faux” intellectual, like a Jimmy Porter, or a man striving to move up the greasy pole. He’s a chippy, arrogant, slightly lazy man with no interest in self-improvement. He’s also a horrendously selfish character, interested only in his own pleasure – I think it goes without saying his treatment of women doesn’t stand up well. Tied of being preached at about the sacrifices of the war generation (who surround him in the factory), he merely wants to do what he wants, when he wants. Despite his flaws, he seemed to capture the feelings of a post-war generation.

The film was also unique for the themes it addressed. It was pretty much unheard-of for a film to even mention the possibility of abortion. It tackled issues of adultery and pre-marital sex (it’s one of the first films to show a man and woman waking up in the morning in bed together). Its lead character drinks, swears (as much as allowed by the censors) and even takes pot shots at neighbours he doesn’t like with an air gun. All of this of course seems rather tame now – but at the time, it was radical to see someone like this, behaving like this, on screen.

The plot, such as it is, is as aimless in many ways as Arthur himself. Not a lot happens in the film, apart from Arthur constantly pushing to not “let the bastards grind you down”. Of course all the pain in the story actually comes from Arthur’s own actions, not least to Brenda, his occasional mistress. Rachael Roberts is sensational as Brenda – the finest performance in the film – a slightly faded former glamour girl, now older, lonely and whose appeal to Arthur (and his appeal to her) seems as much maternal as it does sexual. Brenda’s a tragic figure, clinging to a fantasy of a life free from her dull husband – but slowly (and sadly) learning that she is looking for something from Arthur he can never give her.

By contrast, Arthur’s other conquest, Doreen, is a far more assured, determined and ambitious woman, closer to his own age. Shirley Anne Field is playful and charming, but in her own way as much besotted with Arthur’s rootless masculinity as Brenda. Unlike Brenda though, she is a determined to get what she wants. Arthur and she eventually seem set to settle down for domesticity on a new-build council estate, a decision Arthur seems to resign himself to (he flings a stone impotently at the new houses, but barely seems to understand why). Even this relationship reinforces Arthur’s emptiness – his aimless rebellion lands him eventually in the very conventional lifestyle he spent the rest of the film pushing back against.

Karel Reisz shoots all this with a documentary realism. Freddie Francis’ brilliant photography gives a new wave, neo-realist romance to the Nottingham streets that reinforces the feeling that we are watching a real slice of life. Of course, today much of this revelatory impact of this is lost – we’ve seen these sort of dramas too many times. Arthur’s rebellion is so ill focused – and his attitudes bordering so heavily on the misogynistic – that it’s a lot harder to sympathise with him today than it would have been back then. However, it captures a moment of history, and a feeling many young people at the time had – that the world they were presented with just didn’t match up with what they wanted from life. A dated classic, but still an important piece of film making.