Import

Oliver Twist (J. Arthur Rank; United Artists), delayed for two years in its U.S. showing because of pressure-group charges that it fosters antiSemitism, can be seen at last by U.S. moviegoers for what it is: a brilliant, fascinating movie, no less a classic than the Charles Dickens novel which it brings to life. Indeed, in mirroring Dickens and his illustrator, Cruikshank, the picture is faithful to a fault--hence the ruckus. Its faithfully repulsive portrait of Fagin offended some Jewish groups, who protested that the film would drum up anti-Semitism and succeeded in blocking its U.S. release (TIME, Oct. 4, 1948).

Yet the movie treats Fagin consistently as an individual (as Dickens did), never as a group symbol or scapegoat; it is obviously not anti-Semitic by design, and few are likely to find it anti-Semitic in effect. Attempts to suppress it, raising the issue of precensorship v. a free screen, brought many Jews to the picture's defense. The keepers of Hollywood's Production Code finally withdrew their ban last February, contented themselves with the gesture of cutting out ten minutes of Fagin's close-ups and profiles.

Oliver Twist is long (1 hr. 45 min.) and rich enough to spare the cuts. Directed by David Lean and produced by Ronald Neame, the British team responsible for 1947's superb Great Expectations, the movie recreates the novel's pungent brew of harshly realistic detail, extravagant melodrama, sordid depravity and sentimental warmth. Between the dreary, bare-brick expanse of the parish workhouse where Oliver begins life as an orphan and the elegant Brownlow mansion where he finally takes his rightful place, the settings and costumes summon up all but the smells of Britain's lower depths in the early 1800s: "the cold, wet, shelterless midnight streets of London; the foul and frowsy dens, where vice is closely packed and lacks the room to turn; the haunts of hunger and disease; the shabby rags that scarcely hold together."

Director Lean, who wrote the script with Stanley Haynes, has trimmed away some excess narrative, jettisoned a few minor characters, juggled a few incidents for dramatic effect, but salvaged much of Dickens' original dialogue. Yet Oliver Twist is more than an intelligent adaptation; it is a major creative effort by one of the few directors who has mastered his medium.

Unusually flexible in his cutting and camera movement, Lean has translated some of the novel's long passages (e.g., Oliver's birth and workhouse ordeal, Bill Sikes's remorse over the murder of Nancy) into virtually wordless sequences of visual storytelling at its imaginative best. He has molded most of his actors in the image of the Cruikshank drawings and handled them with the controlled flamboyance of Novelist Dickens himself. If any one threatens to outshine the others, it is Alec (The Cocktail Party) Guinness in the horrendous make-up of Fagin. To the character's sly, rancid evil, he adds a subtle tinge of homosexuality, an interpretive touch neither confirmed nor contradicted by the Dickens text.

As the little hero caught up in bad company and outrageous coincidence, John Howard Davies is completely appealing. The bulky Francis L. Sullivan plays Mr. Bumble to the life; Anthony Newley is artful as The Artful Dodger; Kay Walsh overcomes the handicap of being too pretty to pass as Nancy. Only Robert Newton, as the brutish, black-hearted Bill Sikes, seems at times to bite off more scenery than he can safely chew--but Dickens himself had to cope with readers' objections that the "utterly and incurably bad" character was laid on a bit thick.

Dickens would undoubtedly have been pleased with Director Lean's Oliver Twist. So will anyone who has been pleased by Dickens.

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