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Description: Albert Finney stars as the head of a Shakespearean acting troupe touring Europe during World War II. A senile drunk, Finney is looked after by his dresser, Tom Courtenay. The film details their close and touching relationship as the dresser remains in the background while enabling the once great actor to continue his work. Albert Finney (Big Fish, Annie). 5 Academy Award® nominations – 1983 Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay Adaptation.Amazon.com: It's life in the Theater with a capital T in this film adaptation of the London and Broadway hit by Ronald Harwood. Though we see other people, the film is really a duet between Sir (Albert Finney), an aging actor-manager who runs his own theater company, and Norman (Tom Courtenay), his dresser, who gets him into costume and, ultimately, into shape to go onstage each night. Sir is on his last legs; Norman is alternately his cheerleader, his parent, and his whipping boy--whatever it takes to get Sir up to performance level each night. Finney perfectly captures the vainglorious insecurity of this aging ham, whose career has never quite matched his expectations but who has to convince himself each night (with Norman's help) that a performance in the provinces is as big a deal as treading the boards in the West End. The film lives and dies, however, with Courtenay's neatly nuanced performance as Norman. No man is a hero to his valet--but Courtenay finds the affection along with the disdain that are part of this character. A great backstage tale. --Marshall Fine
Customer Reviews:
- STOP THAT TRAIN!: [As a train is leaving a station]
Sir: Stop that train!
[The train stops at once]
This scene demonstrates the power of acting. Sir (Albert Finney), the head of a Shakespearean acting troupe in Britain, used the authority in his voice that comes from playing King Lear in 227 performances and various other kings and characters an equal number, to stop a train in its tracks. Norman (Tom Courtenay), Sir's dresser, had begged the conductor to wait for just a moment, and was told in no uncertain terms to "sod off." The train left the station on schedule. But then the command to stop that train from the regal voice of Sir stopped the train at once.
'The Dresser' gives a fascinating look behind the scenes, at the backstage drama--the drama behind the drama. Sir may have a voice that can stop trains, but trying to keep a Shakespeare company on tour during war time Britain is quite a chore. All the young and able bodied actors are away fighting, and it is hard to keep an audience enthralled when you are interrupted by air raid sirens and there is the very real possibility that the theater will be bombed. What is troubling Sir? Is it the critics?
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Sir: The critics? No, I have nothing but compassion for them. How can I hate the crippled, the mentally deficient, and the dead?
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Thank you, Sir, for that heart felt vote of confidence. I will try not to disappoint you. In spite of his criticism of critics, Sir is a master thespian, and he knows whereof he speaks:
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Sir: Keep your teeth in!
Geoffrey: It's only when I'm nervous
Sir: You will be nervous. I guarantee it.
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Though Norman, a shy and effeminate dresser, is not much use when it comes to stopping trains, Sir relies on him to the utmost. Sir, like King Lear, the character he is portraying, is getting old and loosing his mind. The stage manager and other cast members doubt that he will even be able to perform. There was an incident earlier in the day that showed that Sir was totally insane. He went berserk and was rescued by the dresser, who knew exactly what to say and how to handle him. Backstage, getting ready, he keeps forgetting which play they are doing and Norman has his hands full getting him on track. He even quotes 'Macbeth' which is a very unlucky thing to do according to thespian superstitions, and requires a whole ritual to undo the damage.
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Sir: 227 Lears... and I can't remember the first line.
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Norman remembers them, and he cues Sir, and on with the show. You get the feeling that Norman remembers not just the first lines, but all the lines. He hovers backstage during the performance, cuing Sir from time to time if he gets stuck. Why then isn't Norman an actor?
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Norman: My memory is like a policeman. It is never there when you want it.
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Exactly. He is great at feeding Sir his lines from backstage, but put him up there and he would freeze like a deer in the headlights. There is a great scene where Norman must make an announcement, and he reluctantly does it, standing on the corner of the stage with a rag in his pocket, barely able to quell the pre show chatter and get the audience's attention. He blows his line, he is supposed to say "anyone who wants to leave" because of the bombing and the air raid but instead says "anyone who wants to live" which is the worst sort of mistake you can make under the circumstances.
Oblivious to how much he stunk; he later asks the cast members how he did. Great, they all reply very insincerely, which Norman accepts without question, due to an ego protecting suspension of disbelief.
Sir also has his fears though, and when they must ask if Oxenby (Edward Fox), one of the actors, will help backstage operating a wind machine for the big storm scene in King Lear, he makes Norman do it. Norman has no trouble in situations like this, drawing power from Sir, even though Sir himself is afraid to do it. Oxenby feels it is beneath his station, and refuses; though later, caught up in the drama, he does help out after all. They all make a supreme effort, and storm up a storm, but does Sir appreciate it?
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Sir: WHERE... WAS... THE STORM?
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Ronald Harwood based his play and subsequent screenplay on his experiences as the dresser for the noted Shakespearean actor Donald Wolfit. Harwood has created an excellent script for a brilliant cast. You really get a sense of the human frailty, ambition, desire, vanity, and weakness behind the masks. It is a really different view of the theater, backstage and through the eyes of the person who knows firsthand the reality behind the play, the dresser.
Peter Yates also directed 'Breaking Away,' 'Krull,' 'Bullitt,' and 'Mother, Jugs, & Speed;' but I would venture to guess that 'The Dresser' is his best work, as cast and story combined to reveal not only the mortality of man, but also the immortality of great art.
SELECTED ROLES OF ALBERT FINNEY
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007) .... Charles Hanson
Erin Brockovich (2000) .... Ed Masry
Under the Volcano (1984) .... Geoffrey Firmin
Shoot the Moon (1982) .... George Dunlap
Tom Jones (1963) (1963) .... Tom Jones
SELECTED ROLES OF TOM COURTENAY
The Golden Compass (New Line Platinum Series Two-Disc Widescreen Edition) (2007) .... Farder Coram
Nicholas Nickleby (2002) .... Newman Noggs (and Edward Fox was Sir Mulberry Hawk)
Last Orders (2001) .... Vic
Doctor Zhivago (1965) .... Pasha
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) .... Colin Smith
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Norman: [to the ambitious young Irene] Never mind the young Cordelia, ducky. He wants a *light* Cordelia!... It's not youth or talent or star quality he's after, ducky, but a moderate eater!
======================= - A love-song to Sir Donald Wolfit: There's a very peculiar review here by one Eric A. Daily, who thinks that the eponymous Dresser is played by John Hurt. Oh no he isn't. It's Tom Courtenay, in one of his most affecting performances. I saw Courtenay play this on the London Stage nearly 30 years ago; unforgettable. By the time I saw the play, Finney had left the cast and "Sir" was played superbly by Freddie Jones, a sometimes underrated, undervalued actor who still is working on UK TV, although now in his eighties; we should be so spry. But this film boasts Albert Finney, and in him and Tom Courtenay you have two of the British theatre's -indeed the World's- greatest living actors.
As the playwright Ronald Harwood has repeatedly said, the play (and film) are based on his own experiences dressing the great, legendary, barnstorming actor Donald Wolfit, who made relatively few film appearances but whose voice was powerful enough to rattle the front-of-house chandeliers. So this is a loving and poignant elegy to a particular era and a particular style of acting that both have passsed from view. This is neither good nor bad, it's just the way things are; cyclical and ever-renewing, because tastes change and interpretations of the classic texts shift from generation to generation. However... experience tells me that when some of today's British theatrical Knights are booming their way through Shakespeare and Chekhov, the backstage corridors at the National Theatre may yet echo with passions and tensions and the creak of over-stretched egos that would sound very familiar to Sir Donald Wolfit's still-growling spectre.
- Behind The Scenes: Suffering through the threat of air raids and a dearth of competent actors in an incomparably dreary wartime England, as well as his own ailing health and encroaching dementia, the aging manager and lead star of a Shakespearean troupe (Finney) and his prissy, fastidious, constantly devoted dresser (Courtenay) tend to their extravagant business under the most difficult of circumstances. While the former struggles with his unreliable sanity, the latter must cope with an increasingly difficult employer, a task for which he is well equipped and never appreciated.
Finney receives top billing, Courtenay the titular role and both men occupy a roughly equal amount of screen time, so that neither man can lay sole claim to the lead in this film. Both deliver extraordinary performances that exploit an exhaustive emotional range, and their own efforts do not eclipse those of an entirely capable supporting cast. Period detail is excellent, as is the rather terse direction. Tremendously popular when released in 1983 and mostly ignored thereafter, this is a film that both students of realist performance and screenwriters who adapt stage material would do well to enjoy and study. - Doesn't work in my DVD player: "The Dresser" Do not understand this. This movie does not play in mt DVD player. I put it in and a "loading" message come up then "wrong Disc". This is the only DVD I have that does not work. I previously bought a used copy of the same movie that had the same result so I thought it was defective. Now I don't know what to think. The movie will play on my computer. It is a mystery to me.
- The Dresser: Acting at its finest! When Al Pacino was asked about an actor's life his advice was 'see The Dresser'. So my advice to all is 'see The Dresser - you won't be disappointed'.
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