75
Alec Guinness as the master pickpocket Fagin is the high point of David Lean's 1948 version of the Dickens classic.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
100
The New York Times by Bosley Crowther
A superb piece of motion picture art and, beyond doubt, one of the finest screen translations of a literary classic ever made.
80
Evocative and endearing - a worthy string to the Lean bow.
75
It’s less impressionistic than Great Expectations and more starkly insistent—fitting for a work that doubles as a social tract about the mistreatment of children in England in the early 1800s. John Howard Davies, as Oliver, has a heartbreakingly fresh face, one that’s increasingly bewildered by the cruelty continually visited upon him.
70
The New Yorker by Pauline Kael
In the person of Alec Guinness, Fagin the Viper, the corrupter of youth, has a sly, depraved charm.