DB7

The principle of Good

David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948)

Andrew Pulver
Saturday April 10, 2004
The Guardian

Author: Charles Dickens (1812-70) was still a full-time political journalist when his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, was published, but by the time he started serialising Oliver Twist, his second, he had handed in his notice to the Morning Chronicle. Oliver Twist appeared in book form in 1838, still under Dickens's pseudonym Boz. It maintained Pickwick 's success, and Dickens went on to become the legendary man of letters of Victorian England. He died of a stroke in 1870.
Story: In Oliver Twist, Dickens wanted to show "the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance". The "adverse circumstance" was characterised by, first, a workhouse (Dickens, ever the journalist, was passionately opposed to the New Poor Laws of 1834) and, second, Fagin's gang. The "Newgate novel" - named after the notorious London jail - was a popular genre of the time, but Dickens refused to sentimentalise his criminals, having them dressed in rags and living in squalor.

David Lean (1908-1991) made his directorial reputation as an interpreter of the words of Noel Coward, but began to define his own identity when he took on an adaptation of Great Expectations in 1946. The film won two Oscars and, against Coward's advice, Lean decided to tread the Dickens path again, attracted by its larger-than-life characters. Lean cast Robert Newton as Sikes (his alcoholism caused lots of delays to the shoot), his soon-to-be-ex-wife Kay Walsh as Nancy (she came up with the tormented opening sequence of Oliver's mother staggering over the moors) and the eight-year-old son of a screenwriter friend, John Howard Davies, in the title role. Alec Guinness had to work hardest for his casting - he'd played Herbert Pocket in Lean's Great Expectations, and was thought too young for Fagin, until he turned up for a screen test with his own make-up on and a false nose.

How book and film compare: Inevitably, Dickens's weighty tome needed pruning. Lean favoured a fast, rhythmic cutting style that meant much of Dickens's rambling dialogue could be excised. Dickens's passionate authorial voice has disappeared, too, and with it much of the original's satiric intent. Lean, however, makes much of the dank alleyways and noisome garrets that provide many of the story's locales - no doubt touching a nerve with a British audience becoming inured to postwar privation. False-perspective sets and occasional expressionist camera techniques (notably a bruisingly effective point-of-view sequence that finishes with Oliver being knocked out) are key in establishing Lean's cinematic equivalent to the Dickens grotesque. The mood of artifice is set right from the start, with the wordless moorland scene of Oliver's mother out in a storm - filmed on a sound stage with clouds painted on glass.

Inspirations and influences: Cruikshank's original illustrations were the starting point for the film's look, especially the make-up for Fagin. (Lean failed to anticipate that such a caricature would cause outrage in a world recently scarred by the Holocaust; the US release was held up for three years.) By accident or design, the chiaroscuro lighting draws a direct connection between primitive English crime fiction - of which Oliver Twist was a derivative - and contemporary film noir.

Ascoyne D'Ascoyne

People tend not to mention the work of the composer of the film-score when talking about a movie.
Oliver Twist boasts a lovely score by the, then, Master of the King's Music, Sir Arnold Bax.
Apparently when the time came to record the score it was found that Bax had overlooked the music for a shot that required it. As the composer was present he wrote the passage straight away and the recording session went ahead unhindered-sheer professionalism!

DB7

Must-have movies: Oliver Twist (1948)

Marc Lee reviews the classics that every film-lover will want to own

When David Lean embarked on another Dickens adaptation immediately after completing his marvellous Great Expectations, Noël Coward, who had co-directed the wartime classic In Which We Serve with Lean, thought it a terrible mistake. Mercifully, Coward's advice went unheeded.

For Oliver Twist surpasses even Great Expectations. Thrilling, heartbreaking, technically astonishing, and crammed with unforgettable performances, it's one of Lean's finest achievements, and one of the best films of a particularly fecund period in British movie-making.

It grips from the very start, as a young, heavily pregnant woman staggers across a terrifying, storm-lashed landscape towards the parish workhouse, where she dies bringing our hero into the world.

This sequence - daringly, more than six minutes pass without a word of dialogue - was devised by Kay Walsh, aka Mrs David Lean, who appears in the film as the tragic Nancy.

The scene depicting Nancy's death at the hands of psychopathic brute Bill Sikes is also breathtakingly powerful - and ingeniously realised. Rather than showing the assault, Lean focuses instead on Sikes's dog as it scrambles and scratches at the door, trying desperately to get out of the room. It's an utterly chilling sight.

Robert Newton plays the drink-maddened Sikes with all the authority of an actor who actually was drunk for much of the shoot. He's the perfect Dickensian grotesque, and not the only one here: Francis L Sullivan is brilliant as the appallingly cruel Mr Bumble, but most memorable of all is Alec Guinness as the creepy, oleaginous Fagin.

Guinness's make-up, which renders him unrecognisable, got the film into trouble in America, where the character was seen as anti-Semitic, and several scenes featuring Fagin were cut. (The prominent prosthetic nose was added after Lean decided Guinness was looking too Christ-like.)

Guinness's performance, though, is inspired. Look out too for youngsters Anthony Newley as the Artful Dodger, a teenage Diana Dors as Charlotte, and, in the title role, eight-year-old John Howard Davies, who combines fragility and resilience with extraordinary assurance.

The perfect casting is matched by the look of the film. The expressionistic sets - interiors and exteriors - induce vertigo, and the lighting - what there is of it - conjures up a dark, nightmarish mood. Squalor and deprivation have rarely been so realistically depicted; nor have goodness and the triumph of hope.

samkydd

One of my earliest film memories on the telly and possibly one of the best films ever made. [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/clapping.gif[/img] The black and white adds a sinister authentic quality, and the desperation and poverty of Victorian London hits home really well. With Messrs Newton and Guiness playing such fantastic evil characters it is almost a horror film, especially when Sykes strangles Nancy! Please don't let them remake this, no-one could possibly improve on near perfection!

"...the chairman of Littlewoods stores made a Keynote speech!"