Wonderful Movie

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Blistering performances.

Watch it for the story but characterisation lets film down.SPOILER ALERT If there were more scenes like that of the killing of Nancy it would have been a great movie. Director Lean stopped and showed Robert Newton just sitting and contemplating what he'd just done and it was peaceful, even beautiful. We should have had a scene like this with Oliver, alone and lonely. An equivalent scene to "Where Is Love?" in the musical. Or even a scene like the magnificent opening one showing his pregnant mother struggling alone against the storm. I can't think of a scene in which Oliver is ever alone. We need that to see his misery and to know him better. Many of the scenes are too cluttered and unrelievingly dark. Maybe Victorian England was like that. Whenever Newton and the wonderful Anthony Newly (Artful Dodger) are on-screen the movie picks up, but truly I felt more for Sykes' dog than for most of the humans! Anti-Semitic depiction of Fagin would not be tolerated today.

A common complaint of today's movies is that there is nothing original and everything is just a sequel, remake or based on something else. It's weird because it really has always been like that, at least as far back as the 1940's. We had tons of classic novels to work on and this film was no exception. I feel bad for not having read the original Dickens classic, but anyone should enjoy this. I am understanding the story more and more through these adaptations. This one wasn't quite as good as "Oliver!", but it definitely ranked as one of the best.I think the main reason is that there are a lot of truly intense moments in this. We get to see most of the characters engage in some very serious and rather violent scenes. Tame by today's standards, but these are some pretty powerful things as we see even Oliver defend himself well. I agree that Fagin does seem like a Jewish stereotype here. It's great how it all leads up to the biggest climax in any "Oliver Twist" version. Dodger doesn't do that much, but he still gets in some great scenes. Oliver Twist himself isn't focused on that much in the second half, but the characters are still interesting enough for you to care about. Alec Guinness is certainly unrecognizable here. ***1/2.

"Oliver Twist" the novel rests at top of mind for the general public when it comes to Charles Dickens. Dickens wrote better novels, so why is "Oliver" so magisterial in his canon? Maybe I'm at fault for not liking the book more, but I suspect the answer has much to do with David Lean.Lean's adaptation of "Oliver Twist" is a textbook example of how a director can boil away the dross and bring out the core of a great story, adhering to the spirit of the author's intent but rediscovering it as a product of its place and time in a way that makes it timeless. The Expressionistic camera-work, its deep-focus lens pulling out details from a seemingly slapdash set, married to an unobtrusive yet penetrating score and a variety of brilliant character actors lending face and voice to a true group effort. It's like "Citizen Kane" meets Hogarth.When we first meet Oliver, he is inside his dying mother as she makes her painful way to a solitary light on a hill, a light that proves more ominous as she gets closer. Her painful journey is later made light of by one of Oliver's first enemies, a beadle named Bumble who sees her strength and bravery as exposing an animal nature that allows for his mistreatment of her son. "God Is Love" says the message on the brick wall of Oliver's workhouse, but there is no love for the boy in the first third of the film, a harrowing journey for any sensitive viewer to make.Francis L. Sullivan plays Bumble, an actor who gives the best performance in Lean's earlier Dickens movie, "Great Expectations." He's quite fine here playing quite a different role, both menacing and funny, but other actors make even deeper impressions.Alec Guinness gives his breakout performance here as Fagin, the crafty thief and seducer of virtue. Yes, Fagin as written by Dickens is also known as "the Jew," and with his big prosthetic nose Guinness plays with that stereotype more than a bit, but he also gets at the core of Dickens' villain by using that to accentuate his role as the consummate outsider, finding diabolical angles in a world where he is not welcome. Guinness was such a cerebral actor that it's hard to adjust to the feral nature of his performance here, except it makes the part and thus the movie.Fagin is a frightening villain, as is first-billed Robert Newton as the crazed Sikes, because we get the fear at the core of their villainy. Dickens wrote "Oliver Twist" not as adventure story but social exposé of his native London, a cruel city of dire poverty and no second chances. Seeing young Oliver (John Howard Davies) at its mercies is no easy thing, and we realize how Fagin and Sikes are products of that society. Watching them face a mob bent on their comeuppance is both thrilling and horrifying, because we know by then how cruel their world is.When the undertaker Sowerberry (Gibb McLaughlin) complains to Bumble early on about the small price given for his services to the workhouse, Bumble just smiles: "So are the coffins!" How he can smile at such a thing is harder to reckon than any of Fagin or Sikes' awful crimes.Being plunged into such a world, one wants for the relief Oliver first finds, than loses, with kindly Mr. Brownlow (Henry Stephenson). Much streamlining is called for here, and aptly done by Lean and co- screenwriter Stanley Haynes. Ditching a maudlin subplot involving a young woman Oliver befriends named Rose Maylie is a stroke of genius given how little she is missed. More problematic is the matter of Oliver's mysterious stalker, Mr. Monks, who does show up here but in a way that raises more questions than answers.Could Oliver have been better incorporated into the film's second half? Howard Davies does great with what he's given, and I for one wanted more. But I think what you do get is pretty classic in its own right, a finale that ranks up there with the best filmdom has ever offered.You will want to read the book after seeing the movie, if you haven't already. And you will likely admire it, as I do, for its humanity and bracing power. Still, for getting across both Dickens' story and its underlying social commentary, no one, not even Dickens himself, did as good a job as Lean and company do here.

After the acclaim he got in the supporting role of Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations, David Lean decided to use Alec Guinness in a starring role in his next masterpiece. Which turned out to be another Dickens story with Guinness playing Fagin in Oliver Twist.It was not an automatic casting however, other people were considered. But according to a recent biography of Alec Guinness, he won the part by appearing in the full Fagin makeup you see on the screen with that unforgettable Cyrano like nose with a hook in it. He also spoke in that mincing lisp and Lean was sold.The portrait of Fagin raised a great hue and cry about it being so good that it was encouraging anti-Semitism, not something the post World War II world wanted to deal with. And the lisp and the mincing walk also had a nice subtext of homophobia with Fagin and his crew of young juvenile thieves. All around it got plenty of criticism, Oliver Twist was not released in the USA until three years later and then with significant cuts in Guinness's role.Whereas Guinness just went outrageously overboard in his acting, he was matched every step of the way by the menacing Robert Newton as Bill Sikes one of the slimiest villains in all of literature. Newton as Sikes is a totally ruthless character and scare the audience as he frightens the rest of the cast.My favorite though is Kay Walsh as Nancy Brown, Sikes's luckless girlfriend. The only character you can compare Nancy to that comes to mind is another woman from 19th century London who fell victim to an evil man is Champagne Ivy in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.In the musical Oliver the big hit song from it is As Long As He Needs Me which is Nancy's number. She sings it about her love for her evil fellow, you can almost hear it in the background. What a payoff this poor woman gets for her love when she develops a conscience.Charles Dickens certainly liked stories about young men who by an unseen fate first get cast down and then in the end triumph over adversity, by their own efforts, but also by events they have no control over. Oliver Twist fits right in with Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and Martin Chuzzlewit in that way. This version still remains the definitive adaption of a classic story and you kids should see this if you don't want to wade through the book for your English class.