My Review of Oliver Twist (1948) directed by David Lean

 This movie is one of the best and controversial adaptations of Charles Dickens. Dickens was a writer who was stage actor at heart, so he wrote works that were designed to be easily adaptable to the stage and consequently have been easily adaptable to the screen. This adaptation was after David Lean's blockbuster 1946 adaptation of Dickens' Great Expectations. Lean reassembled the actors and crew from that production for this one and did a similar streamline of the plot for cinema. This movie was a forerunner of the very new style of film noir that was more popular stateside, but had some admirers in the Old World. This movie employed the camera-style...unfortunately a very ill-timed faithfulness to the illustrations of the source material. 

The acting in this film is phenomenal. Everyone gets into their roles emotionally and really makes you feel like you are in the story. Despite the substantial cuts to the story, much of the social realism of Dickens' novel remains and it feels almost like watching a documentary—almost...

Suppose we have to talk about it. One of the controversies of the original novel was the antisemitism around the character Fagin. Dickens was certainly not known for his sympathy towards non-white gentiles, but the outcry over his portrayal of Fagin in Oliver Twist caused him to revise descriptions of Fagin later editions/printings of the novel. But he kept the illustrations by George Cruikshank. When Alec Guinness makeup for his role as Fagin was shown it caused outrage throughout the US and Europe. Given that the Holocaust had ended only three years earlier the anti-Semitic depiction of Fagin's physical features (the particularly the nose) was in poor taste. A shame as Guinness does a great job in acting the character in my opinion and the movie never makes reference to Fagin being Jewish (seriously, I did not know myself the first time I saw this that Fagin was Jewish until I looked the story up for myself). Still if you can overlook this flaw of the film than it is a good introduction to this story and Dickens (and there are of course other adaptations–not as well acted, but with more of the original story–with much less offensive Fagin makeup).

I have to say the ending of this movie is one of the craziest action sequences I have seen since the ending of Throne of Blood. That sh*t was wild!