Oliver Twist (1951)

Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

The greatest movie ever made..!

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Watch it for the story but characterisation lets film down.SPOILER ALERT If there were more scenes like that of the killing of Nancy it would have been a great movie. Director Lean stopped and showed Robert Newton just sitting and contemplating what he'd just done and it was peaceful, even beautiful. We should have had a scene like this with Oliver, alone and lonely. An equivalent scene to "Where Is Love?" in the musical. Or even a scene like the magnificent opening one showing his pregnant mother struggling alone against the storm. I can't think of a scene in which Oliver is ever alone. We need that to see his misery and to know him better. Many of the scenes are too cluttered and unrelievingly dark. Maybe Victorian England was like that. Whenever Newton and the wonderful Anthony Newly (Artful Dodger) are on-screen the movie picks up, but truly I felt more for Sykes' dog than for most of the humans! Anti-Semitic depiction of Fagin would not be tolerated today.

"Oliver Twist" has been done so many times, including versions in the last few years. I really enjoyed George C. Scott as Fagan, although the boy that played Oliver was hard to take. Then, of course, there's Ron Moody in the musical. What this one has is a period reality to Victorian England. So many of these previous efforts are so sanitized. Let's remember that this little boy was in a workhouse, probably infected with whatever was around, and at the mercy of people who had no love for him. Enter a passel of boys who are pickpockets, working for a thief who uses them. But what else does society offer them? Of course, they are going to be led by someone who can put a modicum of food in their stomachs and a roof over their heads. The bleakness of the times and the randomness of the world is at the center of this one. Not to mention stylings of David Lean, one of the greatest directors in history. It's hard to match this version of the Dickens classic.

OLIVER TWIST is indeed a wonderful movie and this adaptation of the popular novel for me is the best. The director is responsible rounded story, so the biggest fans of the novel (I am one of them) are satisfied. This is a very warm story of poverty, oppression and greed in London in the 19th century. The film highlights the beautiful photograph and a very good scenery. I am fascinated by the game of shadows in the dark. Characterization is good also.All these elements affect the atmosphere of the film. At one point the main character flees through the narrow streets. I'm out of your comfortable armchairs got up and tried to run away with him. I was 12 years old. The opening scene of the movie is really impressive. A child born in a dark atmosphere. The boy takes us through the dark corners of the city, or rather growing up, to finally come to light. A smile and a hug of Oliver Twist is not forgotten.John Howard Davies as Oliver Twist was the boy who gave the film a soul. On the one hand the fragile and delicate, on the other hand shrewd, courageous and witty orphan, that's hard not to love.Alec Guinness as Fagin, stupid is to look at something in the film was never mentioned. The film was banned due to the negative display of leaders of the pickpockets. Fagin is one of the most picturesque characters shown in the film at all. He is immensely clever, insidious and oddly appealing character. I never would have described as the sole villain. Fagin is the personification of the underworld. Poverty and misery create such characters. I would be satisfied when this film would not have a person to villain.However, on one side is, Bill Sykes (Robert Newton) cunning hooligan and on the other side, Mr. Brownlow (Henry Stephenson) gentle and good-natured gentleman. Both play a role in the life of a troubled orphan. Social extremes.

"Oliver Twist" the novel rests at top of mind for the general public when it comes to Charles Dickens. Dickens wrote better novels, so why is "Oliver" so magisterial in his canon? Maybe I'm at fault for not liking the book more, but I suspect the answer has much to do with David Lean.Lean's adaptation of "Oliver Twist" is a textbook example of how a director can boil away the dross and bring out the core of a great story, adhering to the spirit of the author's intent but rediscovering it as a product of its place and time in a way that makes it timeless. The Expressionistic camera-work, its deep-focus lens pulling out details from a seemingly slapdash set, married to an unobtrusive yet penetrating score and a variety of brilliant character actors lending face and voice to a true group effort. It's like "Citizen Kane" meets Hogarth.When we first meet Oliver, he is inside his dying mother as she makes her painful way to a solitary light on a hill, a light that proves more ominous as she gets closer. Her painful journey is later made light of by one of Oliver's first enemies, a beadle named Bumble who sees her strength and bravery as exposing an animal nature that allows for his mistreatment of her son. "God Is Love" says the message on the brick wall of Oliver's workhouse, but there is no love for the boy in the first third of the film, a harrowing journey for any sensitive viewer to make.Francis L. Sullivan plays Bumble, an actor who gives the best performance in Lean's earlier Dickens movie, "Great Expectations." He's quite fine here playing quite a different role, both menacing and funny, but other actors make even deeper impressions.Alec Guinness gives his breakout performance here as Fagin, the crafty thief and seducer of virtue. Yes, Fagin as written by Dickens is also known as "the Jew," and with his big prosthetic nose Guinness plays with that stereotype more than a bit, but he also gets at the core of Dickens' villain by using that to accentuate his role as the consummate outsider, finding diabolical angles in a world where he is not welcome. Guinness was such a cerebral actor that it's hard to adjust to the feral nature of his performance here, except it makes the part and thus the movie.Fagin is a frightening villain, as is first-billed Robert Newton as the crazed Sikes, because we get the fear at the core of their villainy. Dickens wrote "Oliver Twist" not as adventure story but social exposé of his native London, a cruel city of dire poverty and no second chances. Seeing young Oliver (John Howard Davies) at its mercies is no easy thing, and we realize how Fagin and Sikes are products of that society. Watching them face a mob bent on their comeuppance is both thrilling and horrifying, because we know by then how cruel their world is.When the undertaker Sowerberry (Gibb McLaughlin) complains to Bumble early on about the small price given for his services to the workhouse, Bumble just smiles: "So are the coffins!" How he can smile at such a thing is harder to reckon than any of Fagin or Sikes' awful crimes.Being plunged into such a world, one wants for the relief Oliver first finds, than loses, with kindly Mr. Brownlow (Henry Stephenson). Much streamlining is called for here, and aptly done by Lean and co- screenwriter Stanley Haynes. Ditching a maudlin subplot involving a young woman Oliver befriends named Rose Maylie is a stroke of genius given how little she is missed. More problematic is the matter of Oliver's mysterious stalker, Mr. Monks, who does show up here but in a way that raises more questions than answers.Could Oliver have been better incorporated into the film's second half? Howard Davies does great with what he's given, and I for one wanted more. But I think what you do get is pretty classic in its own right, a finale that ranks up there with the best filmdom has ever offered.You will want to read the book after seeing the movie, if you haven't already. And you will likely admire it, as I do, for its humanity and bracing power. Still, for getting across both Dickens' story and its underlying social commentary, no one, not even Dickens himself, did as good a job as Lean and company do here.