Cinema
Historical Present
By ISABEL QU1GLY IF you write about films for a popular daily they tell you (well, they told me) never to presume anything in your readers. Never suppose they may have the smallest know- ledge of anything the film_ may be about. A serious weekly is mercifully full of some presumptions; but how many? When a famous play is turned into a film, are you to sup- pose it already common knowledge? Film- goers can't be presumed to live within theatre- going distance of London; on the other hand, a play's fame can spread a lot farther than its immediate audience, even before the film- makers get their hands on it, as they have in the case of John Osborne. Already he is tangled up in his own legend, already dated in the sense that his plays seem already (at the rate the world moves) period pieces, though the period was only a very short- while ago. Each year, every few months, new words turn up charged with new meanings : names of places and people that quite suddenly, for something that happens in them or to them, get social, political, moral or even just disastrous importance; emotive words you could never have foreseen would arouse violent reactions in Anyone. The Enter- tainer has the word `,Stiez' deliberately placed to keep it anchored in its particular time and cir- cumstances; and gradually the climate of things changes, things increase or diminish, impor- tances vary, moods seem less familiar, and suddenly you realise that what was 'the present' has become 'historical.'
In filming The Entertainer ('X' certificate) much the same policy applied as in filming Look pack in Anger; some of the same stage cast, the same director (Tony Richardson) and Osborne himself around to keep an eye on things (the script is his and Nigel Kneale's). Again, the place becomes important (what a topographi- cal medium it is!): the mood of streets, scenes, crowds, faces, enriching (not dissipating) the cen- tral characters. The scene is Morecambe, sleazy, sunshiny; pubs and caravans, bathing beauties, ice-cream, rubber shoes and plastic buckets, sometimes a glimpse of beach and real waves not made or even circumscribed by people. And moods and attitudes are repeated in the scenes where they are felt: the obvious parallel of Archie's spiritual state and his tatty surroundings, the holiday unproductiveness, the whole of life geared to keep busy doing nothing, like Archie's; the family rows and the screeching Punch and- Judy slow, all the obvious but telling symbolism of tea shop and iced cake and afternoon love- making in a caravan (compact and anonymous).
Then there is Osborne's rather disconcerting habit, more suitable to the cinema than the theatre, I think, since gestures and idiosyncrasies and the detail of facial expression count more in the cinema, of suddenly reminding one of people one knows .who may not be the least 'like' his characters but have something in common, a kind of joint corner of humanity: an ability to draw general conclusions from private peculiarities, to get the pith of a particular sort of person so that, even if the externals vary, you still recognise the similar, central man if yot, meet him (however disguised) again. For instance, Archie Rice's mental (quite apart from his social, moral, domestic, etc. etc.) irrespon- sibility may suddenly appear perfectly recog- nisable in someone not the least bit socially, morally or domestically irresponsible. Olivier's Archie had so many facets that this Tye been there' before' feeling kept cropping up; and yet he didn't (I felt) ever quite get inside the sheer awfulness of being Archie at all. Only in his scenes with Shirley Anne Field did he appear a rounded 6erson—someone with an inside life (however dim) as well as a manner, an exterior. And this somehow seemed connected with the fact that Miss Field didn't—and the effect was very touching--seem to be 'acting' at all. Her performance had a sort of radiant naïveté some- thing like Cliff Richards's in Expresso Bongo, as if she wasn't the least bit in touch with what the rest of the cast was up to or the author meant; but was so stunned, so shaken and en- thralled by Archie that she hardly knew what she was up to, and so, by one of those occasional tricks of innocence, managed to be up to just what was needed. Maybe the effect of Olivier (himself) on a young actress was just what was needed to make his portrait of Archie seem credible as a charmer. Thora Hird, as the girl's voracious mum, set off the girl's dewiness exactly as it wanted to be.
Disappointingly episodic, the filmed Enter- tainer is full of good moments, but the general impression is a bit woolly, even—of all things —a bit conventional in attitude and tone; or maybe just over-familiarly, determinedly epatant. But compare it with pretty well anything the British cinema gives us these days and it stands out: for saying something, for showing people and for being a million miles from the Travel- and-Holidays-Association view of Britain so almost ubiquitous in British films.
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