Alec Guinness as the master pickpocket Fagin is the high point of David Lean's 1948 version of the Dickens classic.
Oliver Twist
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
United Kingdom · 1948
1h 55m
Director David Lean
Starring John Howard Davies, Robert Newton, Alec Guinness, Kay Walsh
Genre Adventure, Drama, Family
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When 9-year-old orphan Oliver Twist dares to ask his cruel taskmaster, Mr. Bumble, for a second serving of gruel, he's hired out as an apprentice. After escaping that dismal fate, young Oliver falls in with the street urchin known as the Artful Dodger and his criminal mentor, Fagin.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
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.
Evocative and endearing - a worthy string to the Lean bow.
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.
The New Yorker by Pauline Kael
In the person of Alec Guinness, Fagin the Viper, the corrupter of youth, has a sly, depraved charm.
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