One of the greatest casts ever assembled electrifies The Entertainer, John Osborne’s sturdy play that Osborne and Nigel Kneale adapted and Tony Richardson directed starkly, if crudely and disjointedly. (Richardson would make only one other film even half as good: A Delicate Balance, 1973, from Edward Albee’s play.) Laurence Olivier is staggering re-creating his stage role as debt-drowning, seedy music hall singing comic Archie Rice, a throwback to earlier times; Roger Livesey, deeply affecting, plays Rice’s father, Billy, Joan Plowright Rice’s daughter, Jean, Albert Finney and Alan Bates his sons, Brenda de Banzie his second wife, Phoebe, and Daniel Massey, Shirley Anne Field and Thora Hird in other roles.
The intended metaphor, however well it may have worked onstage, doesn’t (and perhaps cannot) transfer to the screen. Olivier is too agonizingly real, despite the restraint and distance of Richardson’s camera in the vast majority of shots, for the intention to hold; Olivier’s urgent, tremendous performance overwhelms the abstraction of British depression and decline, including the evaporation of Empire. The irony that such a lowly, selfish, dead-eyed sort as Archie represents all this is lost. On the other hand, with that dimension excised, the characters still fascinate as themselves, and in particular the father-son duo of Billy and Archie, one blubberingly sentimental and the other cold and manipulative, both of them desperate, rip the heart out. That Livesey once upon a time was cinema’s Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, 1944) causes the film to shimmer with a vestige of Osborne’s larger intent.
There’s no getting around another point of fascination: despite the years between them, the Olivier-Plowright offstage romantic pairing that helped end one of the most widely publicized extramarital affairs and subsequent marriages of the twentieth century.
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THE BLACK DEVIL (Georges Méliès, 1905)
April 8, 2010We must take pioneering French filmmaker Georges Méliès at his word that he had no interest in turning film into art but, rather, wished to create theatrical scenes—but scenes containing camera tricks to conjure illusions that could not occur on stage. Le diable noir, called in the U.S. The Black Imp, is typical of his wee intentions. It is a kind of nonsense that has some affinity, perhaps, to the verbal kind that we associate with Edward Lear’s verse.
In Le diable noir, a human-sized, black cat-like figure with a beard plainly considers a bedroom at an inn, especially the bed, as its domain. This “imp” disappears. Enter a guest (Méliès) for a night’s lodging. Increasingly taxing the man’s sanity, the invisible imp makes furniture suddenly appear or disappear, including a chair right out from under the guest; at another turn, the chair multiplies succesively. The series of quick cuts that creates these illusions—despite what some people seem to think, there isn’t a single jump-cut in the four-minute film—is exquisitely timed to convey some sense of its own reality, which wars with the guest’s rationality. When the mischief-maker turns visible and chases him, the guest has perhaps passed into a condition that represents the total opposite of the night’s sweet rest which he had sought. Eventually, like a madman in a straight-jacket, he is escorted out of the room by the innkeeper and others, and the imp merrily reclaims its bed.
There is no serious consideration here of the guest’s interiority, for instance, of the paranoid insecurity that might afflict someone away from home. The film aims only to delight with cinematic tricks.
Méliès made more than 550 films, in which he almost always appeared, between 1896 and the First World War.
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