A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #32: David Lean’s Oliver Twist.

Two years after David Lean’s Great Expec­ta­tions, Alec Guin­ness is back in another Dick­ens adap­ta­tion. This time he’s very aged through makeup and a giant pros­thetic nose [that got the film denounced as anti-​Semitic], but his por­trayal of Fagin really shows off his par­tic­u­lar act­ing chops. His struck posed eccen­tric­ity steals the show in every scene he’s in, although some­times the beau­ti­ful Nancy gives him a run for his money. I’m only famil­iar with the Oliver Twist tale in terms of mod­ern cul­tural ref­er­ences, like Chef Boyardee com­mer­cials. Yet it seems as if the same [albeit small] issues that were found in Great Expec­ta­tions are here as well. Namely, the incon­sis­tent use of inter­ti­tles as nar­ra­tive cues, and obvi­ous plot exci­sions to remain true to the core story. Where this film astounds is in the cin­e­matog­ra­phy. Much more var­ied than Great Expec­ta­tions, dutch angles, sub­jec­tive camera-​work and amaz­ing approx­i­ma­tions of nat­ural light make the film beau­ti­ful to watch even when the action gets a bit bor­ing and predictable.

The artistry that I claimed hard to find in most of Lean’s work is always evi­dent here. From the Ger­man Expres­sion­ist rem­i­nis­cent Lon­don exte­ri­ors, to metaphor­i­cal shots that reflect pain or vio­lence, like the open­ing scene’s shot of thorned branches cut to a woman in labor pains, to a later scene where a woman’s mur­der hap­pens off­screen while a dog scrab­bles and yelps to run out of the room. Where Great Expec­ta­tions was psy­cho­log­i­cally charged, Oliver Twist is more con­cerned with phys­i­cal abuse. Although the film is quite vio­lent, how­ever, it never really seems as though Oliver has it that badly off. Espe­cially since we know how tired the trope of down-​on-​his-​luck makes good is. This isn’t the fault of the movie, but a nec­es­sary expec­ta­tion derived from the legacy of Dickens’s influ­ence on Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture and story-​telling as a whole.

The con­tro­versy engen­dered by this film was mostly con­cerned with the anti-​Semitism implicit in Fagin’s char­ac­ter. There really isn’t any way to soften it more than Alec Guinness’s por­trayal man­aged. Fagin isn’t so much a bad char­ac­ter as one to be pitied; his obvi­ous care for his pick­pocket charges is just twisted by avarice. The fact that he is Jew­ish is inci­den­tal to this, but unfor­tu­nate since it does play to cer­tain stereo­types. Com­ing as quickly as it did on the heels of World War II [dis­trib­uted in 1948], the tim­ing for the release of the film could cer­tainly have been a bit more tact­ful. Nev­er­the­less, the classic-​status of Oliver Twist as a novel and its trickle-​down to this film in par­tic­u­lar will leave these thorny prob­lems to crop up each time some­one decides to make a great adap­ta­tion of the work.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Michael Sragow
• YouTube Trailer
• Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist in an easy-​to-​read HTML format
• Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review