Oliver Twist (1948)

Tonight's lineup on TCM is a bunch of adaptations of the works of Dickens, which includes a chance to see MGM's 1938 version of A Christmas Carol at 8:00 PM, this being the Christmas season after all. But the movie I'd lik to mention is the 1948 British version of Oliver Twist, which comes on overnight at 2:15 AM, which is still late this evening if you're out on the west coast.

The movie starts off with a woman who's apparently heavily pregnant, but able to move surprisingly well for a pregnant woman. She shows up at a parish workhouse, which serves as an orphanage for all the lower-class children without parents, gives birth, and dies soon after, leaving behind the kid and a locket.

Fast forward nine years, and the kid, little Oliver Twist (John Howard Davies) is suffering in the orphanage under the cruel treatment of the administrator Bumble (Francis L. Sullivan), especially because Oliver is slightly more foolhardy enough to stand up for himself than all the other kids. One day the kids draw straws to see who's going to have to ask the adults for a second helping of gruel, and Oliver gets the short straw. For his impertinence, the administrators send Oliver to be apprenticed to an undertaker, Mr. Sowerberry

The undertaker isn't much better, and thanks to more bad treatment, Oliver eventually runs away, making his way to London, the great city of the day where there are a million people and nobody will ever be able to find him, not that he's got any marketable skills or anything like that. In London, he's espied by a teenaged urchin nicknamed the Artful Dodger (a young Anthony Newley), who is part of gang of criminal youths, mostly pickpockets, led by the adult Fagin (Alec Guinness). The Dodger takes Oliver in, and Fagin starts teaching Oliver the tricks of the trade.

In an attempted robbery gone wrong, Oliver is wrongly accused of trying to pick the pocket of wealthy Mr. Brownlow (Henry Stephenson), when he was just watching. So technically he's guilty of being an accomplice although there's no evidence of that. When a witness states he saw two other kids doing the actual deed, Oliver is released to the care of Brownlow, who turns out to be an incredibly nice guy.

Unfortunately, Oliver has a bit of a past, and not just being an orphan, thanks to that locket that would reveal a big secret. A guy named Monks (Ralph Truman) suspects something, and asks Fagin to get Oliver while he tries to get the locket. Fagin's men, in the form of Bill Sykes (Robert Newton) and his girlfriend Nancy (Kay Walsh) do kidnap Oliver.

There are more twists (no pun intended) and turns, of course, this being based on a Dickens novel, and Charles Dickens having written precious little that's actually short. (If memory serves, most of his novels were originally published as serializations, which would explain the length -- Dickens needed to keep writing more installments for the money!) But little Oliver winds up having a happy ending as you can probably guess.

There were a couple of things that really stuck out at me when watching this adaptation of Oliver Twist, directed by David Lean at the start of his career. One is that the production values seemed slighlty off, at least certainly nowhere near those of the Korda brothers or Powell and Pressburger. I'm not certain how much this has to do with the fact that there was still post-war rationing going on in the UK. But watching Oliver Twist felt more like watching an RKO movie than watching a glossy MGM literary adaptation. Not that this makes the movie bad; it just didn't seem to have that shine. I don't recall having that feeling while watching Lean's earlier Great Expectations (on at midnight), which I think came mostly from the same studio.

The other obvious thing was Fagin. Not only is Fagin supposed to be Jewish, he's a very obvious and negative stereotype, complete with the thoroughly unnatural hook nose. Guinness is so made up that this, along with the anti-Semitism, may be disconcerting to some viewers. Overall, though, this adaptation of Oliver Twist is definitely worth watching, especially since it doesn't have the cloying musical numbers of the 1960s musical. (There's a traditional song or two sung in a dive bar.)

This version of Oliver Twist has received a DVD release courtesy of the Criterion Collection, so it's a bit pricey.