Oliver! (1968): Eitan's Take

I sometimes forget how dark and visionary the work of Charles Dickens can be. I read most of his great books (Great Expectations, Bleak House, David Copperfield) and loved them, but time has dulled them in my memory. Seeing Oliver tonight brought back a lot of recollections about the grim choreography of his greatest narratives. I've never read Oliver Twist, and before I saw this musical adaptation I was wary; would it be a trifling children's musical, along the lines of Mary Poppins? Would it be a bland British snoozefest a la Tom Jones? I was surprised and pleased to find out that it is neither. Oliver is a flawed musical, carried end to end by some cliche moments and quite few unmemorable songs, but aside from some basic quibbles with the narrative, I was enthralled with Carol Reed's insightful and bold handling of the story, as well as the guts it took to address what is essentially a children's story with such an unapologetically dark tone.

Carol Reed is the mastermind behind The Third Man, so I shouldn't have been surprised that this film was elegantly and inventively shot to the point of breathlessness. Some of the musical sequences, especially "Consider Yourself," are filmed with such agility, precision, and warmth, that I may very well consider them to be among the finest moments in cinematographic history. There are no iconic shots, per se (as opposed to the many such moments in The Third Man), but as with the best sequences in the great movie musicals we've watched -- the opening shots of The Sound of Music, the garage dance in West Side Story, basically all of An American in Paris -- the whole scene feels indelible from start to finish. Besides the obviousness of the period sets, there is absolutely nothing in the artistic design, costuming, camerawork, or choreography that feels the slightest bit contrived. The film has no manners. It is unconcerned with making us happy or delighting us with saccharine imagery. Each song and each dance reveals another layer of Dickens' story -- its bleakness, its whimsy, its sharp approach to the hideousness and beauty of crime, its unrelenting aura of violence and fear. Adapting Dickens' formal prose into a musical might seem like a daunting or ridiculous idea, but the fact that the film preserves the author's narrative ingenuity while translating it into a production so elaborately conceived and executed is a testament to the gamble it took for Reed to take on the project to begin with.

The performances are similarly refined, and no review of this film would be complete without a complete and utter appraisal of the dark, deranged performance of Oliver Reed. It might just be that he looks a lot like Javier Bardem, but I sensed a lot of Anton Chighurh in his portrayal of the vicious Bill Sikes. (Why was this rated G?) His absolutely terrifying eyes peering through the mail slot at Oliver, his jacket filled with crowbars, and those weapon-like muttonchops all account for something, but Oliver Reed's performance is way more than the sum of his parts. Of course, the character is written as a remorseless thug, but few actors other than the frightening-in-real-life Reed could have pulled off this brave and intense a performance.

Oliver is, quite simply, one of the two or three biggest surprises for me in this project so far. I dreaded it for a long time as the G-rated-gagfest that stood in the way of watching Midnight Cowboy. But having seen it, I can almost say that this is far darker, far more sophisticated, and far more deranged (you only need to see the shot of Sikes dangling, stone dead, over the Tim Burtonesque setpiece near the end of the film to believe me) than the X-rated, death-and-despair Best Picture winner that followed. The haunting retelling of a familiar story, the brilliant art design, the crisp and inventive late-60's cinematography, and the incendiary direction of Carol Reed earn this film a 9/10.