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The Entertainer (Bryanston; Continental). "ARCHIE RICE," it says in 6-ft. letters on a shabby music hall in a third-rate watering place in the north of England. "Archie Rice, the one and only." Thank God for that, the manager is thinking. Here it is, the height of the season, and not 50 people in the house. Archie's up there, center stage, backed by a tableau of nudes, hollering a patriotic song and keeping time with his midsection. Then he does a little tap dance, insults the bandmaster, sticks his cane in the trombone and leers as he wiggles it around, tells a joke ("The old church bell won't ring tonight as the vicar's got the clapper") that nobody laughs at, so he tries another song: "Thank God we're normal (bump), normal (bump), normal (bump)!" Somebody in the audience groans: "Where did they dig him up?"

They didn't. Archie Rice (Sir Laurence Olivier) may stink but he's not dead, and if he was, he'd be too much of a clot to lie down. After the show he emcees a beauty contest and then chases after the delicious "piece of crackling" who wins second prize. "All she needs," the girl's mother assures Archie, "is a little push.'' So Archie gives her a push, but not the kind her mother had in mind.

Then he finds out the family has a packet, which is just what he needs to put a new show on the road--he's flopped so often the commercial managers won't give him beans for hopscotch. So he offers the poor silly girl a theoretical part in a hypothetical show and, taking no chances on her old man, offers her a walk in church besides. Never mind he's twice her age. Never mind poor Phoebe (Brenda de Banzie), the old bag he's been married to for 20 years. And so on and on till Archie, having passed a number of bum checks, is about to be hauled off to the choky. "Oh, well," he smirks, "I'm sure to meet some people I know."

On the stage, even though many of its scenes were well written by Playwright John (Look Back in Anger) Osborne, The Entertainer was one of those plays in which the parts are greater than the whole; and the film, which was also written by Osborne and directed by Tony Richardson, is bedeviled by the same faults. Like Archie's life, it is too much of a mess, especially toward the end. Moreover, the attempt at social criticism is strained. Osborne's angry vision of England--as a peeling music hall in which no-talent bums hold the center of the stage and a public stupefied by socialized security hums mindlessly the theme song of the welfare state ("Why should I care, why should I let it touch me?")--is never less than a magnificent metaphor but always less than convincing; and for U.S. audiences, it may even be less than interesting. What's more, the film sometimes suffers by comparison with the play. The outdoor scenes let too much fresh air into Archie's grubby little life, and the audience loses its physical sense of his essential experience: moral suffocation.

Nevertheless the film is a fascinating thing, partly because of Osborne's cruel skill at picking scabs from the wounds his people carry, mostly because of a touching performance by Actress de Banzie and a smashing one by Actor Olivier. Olivier's Archie is a masterpiece of mannerism. He carries his body like a hyena's, hunched at the neck with the legs dragging carelessly behind. His smile is big, showy, meaningless. His hands are furtive, fiddling, scratching. His eyes are busy, empty, dead. It can, of course, be objected that Olivier's Archie is more a mannerism than a man, that Olivier does everything Archie would do in real life--except live. But then Archie himself did everything except live.

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