New Movies: Vice into Romance

CHAPTER I Treats of the History of the Work

Dickens was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. One had only to look at Oliver to see for one’s self that Dickens was as dead as Jacob Marley.

He had written Oliver Twist to rip the brocade from Puritan England and reveal the human misery beneath. To those who found his melodrama too coarse, Dickens replied: “Criminal characters, to suit them, must be, like their meat, in delicate disguise … It is wonderful,” he continued, “how Virtue turns from dirty stockings; and how Vice, married to ribbons and a little gay attire, changes her name, as wedded ladies do, and becomes Romance.”

CHAPTER II

Relates How the Musical Mingles the Appropriate and the Not So

Vice is what Oliver Twist tells; Romance is what Oliver sells in this musical adaptation. And what a musical it is. A contradictory, comic, overstuffed, gleaming, steaming, rum plum pudding of a film.

First there are the sets. “They can’t go out whistling the scenery” is the axiom of the musical theater. Yet audiences will at least go out whistling at the scenery. John Box’s sets—the largest ever made in England—are miraculous recreations of higher and lower London. Here are the scrubbed Georgian facades of Bloomsbury, the madding, clangorous market streets, the crowded mass of blackened chimneys and gables in the Thamesside jungle. All, all are lifted from England of the 1830’s and set down without so much as a cobblestone out of place.

Then there are the songs. “The Parish Boy’s Progress” has nothing to sing about, but that has not stopped Composer-Lyricist Lionel Bart. Starveling orphans chant about Food, Glorious Food. Oliver asks Where Is Love? Fagin warbles, “Can a fellow be a villain all his life?” Well done? Indeed. Appropriate? In doubt. Putting trust in sounds and forms, Bart has obscured the message of “that great Christian,” as Dostoevsky once called Dickens. The “demd horrid grind” is gone. In its place is solid, canny entertainment. Purists and sociologists will object as loudly as Christmas audiences will applaud.

CHAPTER III

And Last: Praise and a Prediction Based on a Past Performance

The fortunes of those who had figured in this account are nearly closed. The little that remains to their historian to relate is told in few and simple words. It is well that Director Carol Reed (The Third Man) has strayed from the far less successful Broadway version, which was stunted by stage boundaries and hampered by overplayers. Instead he has gone to a richer predecessor: David Lean’s virtuous 1948 adaptation, memorable for its palpable atmosphere of terror and decorum. After a season of watching inane twitching in the name of dance, the viewer is most happily greeted by Onna White’s choreography, an exuberant step-by-step exploration of Victorian zeal.

Dickens was congenitally unable to invent villains less interesting than his heroes. As Fagin, Ron Moody makes the beaky, sneaky old vulture a tragicomic creature whose greatest thievery is that of the film. If he has lost most of the Semitism, Moody also has dropped all of the anti. Harry Secombe is the endomorphic Mr. Bumble to the burble, and Oliver Reed is appropriately thick and menacing as Bill Sikes.

Next to the base figures, such exalted ones as Oliver (Mark Lester), Nancy (Shani Wallis) and other do-gooders inevitably seem insipid trifles. But even the knaves are topped by two performers: Bill Sikes’ companion, a mangy, miserable mongrel, is the least appealing, most memorable dog since the Hound of the Baskervilles. And Jack Wild, 15, as The Artful Dodger, has polished gravel for a voice, a Toby jug for a head, and the suggestion of fame for a future. As well might be. The last boy to play the Dodger onscreen was a cockney-of-the-walk by the name of Anthony Newley.