The edited version then cut most of Fagin's profile shots. Anti-Defamation League protests prevented the film from being released in the United States until 1951. The film doesn't identify Fagin specifically as Jewish, but the exaggerated hooked nose Lean chose for Guinness to wear caused controversy and accusations of anti-Semitism, unsurprising given its release only three years after the Holocaust ended. He is a man out of place and time, dressed more like Moses in tattered robes than the leader of a 19th-century London street gang. His overdone nose, beard, and wig would never work in a color film, and is barely tolerable in a black-and-white one. Sir Alec Guinness, who had teamed up with Lean for an earlier Dickens adaptation, the 1946 Great Expectations, is done up in a dramatic makeup job that makes the great actor resemble Oz's Wicked Witch of the West. The low-angle view of a raised murder weapon predicts the terrible violence about to unfold. It's at night that a man murders his girlfriend. Bad things happen in the darkness - both metaphorical and actual - and good things happen in the light - of day and of the enlightened mind. The dark and the light tell the story here, too. The stunning black-and-white photography in Oliver Twist helps to underscore the dreary unseen worlds of oppression: in the workhouse, at the factory that abuses child workers, on the streets where orphaned urchins are slaves to unsavory gangs. Lean was a master of the cinematic art, and every lighting trick, camera angle, set detail, costume, and sound effect on display bolsters the sharp storytelling in this film. The complexity and length of the story reminds viewers that Dickens was paid by the editors who serialized his fiction by the word. Fagin cohort Sykes murders his own girlfriend, Nancy (Kay Walsh who was then David Lean's wife), when Fagin persuades him that she's sold them all out in exchange for Oliver. If he can eliminate Oliver, the family inheritance will be his, but Brownlow never gives up. When Oliver is kidnapped back into thievery by Fagin's troop, an unscrupulous Brownlow family member traces the amulet to the workhouse, which leads him to Oliver. An immediate kinship is felt by the boy and the generous old man, who turns out to be the boy's grandfather. When he faints from influenza, the wealthy and kindly pickpocket victim Brownlow (Henry Stephenson) takes the boy home, where he's nursed to health. The Dodger gets away but the police capture Oliver. Coincidence plays a role when the Dodger takes Oliver on a job lifting a gentleman's wallet. Oliver escapes and runs off to London, where he's immediately spotted by the Artful Dodger (a prepubescent Anthony Newley), a well-trained pickpocket and general thief in the boys' army created by a London underworld criminal called Fagin (Alex Guinness). Sullivan), to a man who uses Oliver for child labor. When the boy turns 9, he's sold by the workhouse proprietor, Bumble (Francis L. She dies after childbirth, leaving her son and an amulet behind. ![]() Oliver (John Howard Davies) is the illegitimate child of a wealthy English woman who runs away to give birth in a parish workhouse. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails.Ĭharles Dickens' OLIVER TWIST is given a fairly faithful retelling by the master filmmaker David Lean in this black-and-white classic. A previous scene shows he has a rope around his neck, but the fact that this accidentally hangs him isn't shown. Children, virtual slaves at the workhouse, work hard and are fed nothing but thin gruel. A raised club is seen, and later a partial view of a dead body, but neither the actual murder nor the bloody aftermath is shown. ![]() Although Bill Sykes' girlfriend, Nancy, is a prostitute, the movie doesn't specifically state this. ![]() Thievery, child labor, and murder seem ordinary events in this world. This is a grim world where the poor are discriminated against, where the comfort of a person's life is determined by class, education, and gender. Parents need to know that David Lean's 1948 Oliver Twist is a black-and-white adaptation of Charles Dickens' famed novel, which is also the source material of the musical Oliver! Lean doesn't shy from the cruelty against children and the suppression of women that were hallmarks of Dickens' times and his work.
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