The Entertainer

Archie Rice is a veteran music-hall performer whose career has faded and whose debts keep piling up. He works a seaside resort, playing to audiences that barely respond, drinking heavily and lashing out at his long-suffering wife Phoebe while his father Billy, a former performer himself, watches uneasily. Desperate to reverse his fortunes and restore his name, Archie tries to persuade Billy to back a new venture, a scheme that draws the whole family into his troubles. The conflict is not only professional: his personal life is coming apart at the same time.

The Entertainer is a British drama directed by Tony Richardson, the first of ten films listed in his filmography and the earliest of the titles he made before The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Tom Jones. John Osborne wrote the screenplay with Nigel Kneale, and Harry Saltzman produced it for Woodfall Film Productions and Continental. Laurence Olivier leads the cast as Archie, with Brenda De Banzie, Roger Livesey, Joan Plowright, Alan Bates and Daniel Massey among the twenty-two credited performers.

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7.1 from around 4,100 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.2 from 59 votes. A critics' rating of 7.3 from 14 reviews places it above the audience score on TMDB, though it is largely in line with the larger IMDb sample.