How Oliver! Does Musical Justice To Dickens

Before any Dickens fanatic swears "Bah! Humbug!" at the sight of a Technicolor musical adaptation of Oliver Twist, let's review the situation and one will find that there is more worth in Sir Carol Reed's film than meets the eye. Dickens' second novel is rightfully considered as worthy accomplishment for its author. In its sprawling length yet masterful blend of sordid realism and sensational melodrama, it is an early testament to his uncanny skill to tell a story of impoverishment and poverty perpetrated and sustained by a bureaucratic machinery of corrupt governance and petty crime with plenty of salty wit and a stirring gift for description. With his idiosyncratic characters and a spurious capacity for grim, but also perversely gleeful, comedy, Dickens managed to render the history of a mostly ill-fated parish boy into a hugely entertaining and empathetic soap opera.

So, perhaps recognising these elements of broad humour and satirical whimsy, Reed's ambitious and colourful treatment of the material feels strangely appropriate and even reverent to the rousing spirit of the story. By contrast, Sir David Lean's leaner film, filmed gorgeously in inky black-and-white, reduced the sprawling length and volume of the novel and characters into a simpler story, thus skimping on the gritty poetry of Dickens' prose as well as its thoughtful quality, what Graham Greene, in his laudatory essay, called, "that sense of a mind speaking to itself with no one there to listen." The older film, even with Lean's customary skill at dramatic imagery (the scene of Oliver's mother plodding through a thunderous night illuminated only by forked lightning or Nancy's murder rendered in its stark, sweaty brutality) and a typically fastidious Alec Guinness as a convincingly crafty Fagin, misses completely "the delicate and exact poetic cadences" of the novel's prose in its earnest and meticulous efforts to recreate its realism. While being skilfully crafted, it also sacrifices Dickens' humanism completely.

But Reed's film benefits from its creative license and even its audacious use of Lionel Bart's songs. They are harnessed as deftly as Dickens would use his inward-thinking monologues or descriptions of people and places to enrich the story's depth. In less successful musicals, the songs are, if not memorably orchestrated or melodious themselves, almost hindrances to the ebb and flow of the narrative - something that happened in the much ballyhooed La La Land. But Oliver! deftly embraces the musical form to flesh out the bare bones of the plot even with its detours - Monks and Miss Maylie are nowhere to be found here. The songs don't just provide a clever storytelling flourish, like when Fagin explains the significance of his trade in You've Got To Pick A Pocket Or Two or Mr. Bumble walking around on snowy streets, offering Oliver as a cheap apprentice in the mournful Boy For Sale, but also an inspired technique to develop the milieu - Nancy's optimistic celebration of the rough charms of her scruffy existence in It's A Fine Life - or even the characters - Fagin's conflicted thoughts about his profession in Reviewing The Situation - and even a sense of perspective like in Oliver's yearning for love and care in the cellar of the parochial undertaker.

One man, however, refuses to lend a singing voice to his brutal, callous thoughts and feelings. When we first see Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes, it is as a tall and sinister shadow on a brick wall and one remembers, fondly, Harry Lime skulking around in the nocturnal shadows of Vienna. The director clearly had lost none of his flair for atmospheric menace and despite all the colour and frolic, it is the grimmer aspects of the film that are equally worthy of mention. One grins heartily at the fish-wives and newspaper boys as they go down the streets of London parading their fares in Consider Yourself but the smile gains a shade of bitterness at the sight of the chimney-sweepers with their blackened faces and limbs. In the middle of this rousing ode to the bustle of a city's various trades, Reed has ingeniously thrown in an element of pitch-black social satire. How proud Dickens could've been at that.

But most crucially, it is in one uncanny aspect that the film really comes close to the essence of the novel. As Greene himself summed up elegantly, one of the crowning qualities of Dickens' vision was the inescapable feeling that its parallel world of darkness and decadence was more sinfully enduring and indelible than the contrast of saintly innocence found elsewhere. And thus, rather unexpectedly, by making Fagin, largely due to Ron Moody's boisterous yet tender performance, and by lending Sikes a countenance of rugged charm with his mutton chop whiskers, Oliver! shows how pale and unconvincing the brightness of squeaky clean goodness feels in front of such dark fascination. True to the novel, for all his lovable fondness for reading, Mr. Brownlow is something of a well-intentioned simpleton and even the splendid display of the morning glory of Bloomsbury Square fades in memory compared to the dank, dirty but nevertheless domesticated refuge of Fagin's smoky lair, enlivened by its wizened old host and his doting disciples. These are characters who earn our admiration and Shana Wallis' Nancy, too, is a shade more sweet and sensual, thus winning our heart and sympathy better than any Miss Maylie could ever do. The climax itself illustrates this point all too well. That scene of Oliver embracing Mrs. Bedwin seems almost insincere; this film should have ended right with Fagin and the Artful Dodger, played by the cocky Jack Wild, trotting off into the sunset with nothing but a stolen wallet and an inexhaustible reserve of optimism between them, two charming crooks who linger in our memory longer than any mild-mannered gentleman living in Pentonville.