Oliver!

#44 in my ranking of Best Picture winners at the Oscars.

To me, the greatest appeal of the musical genre in general is the artifice of it all. People don’t just break out in song all that much in real life, and doing it in film is generally pretty unnatural. Embrace it. On the one hand you have something like The Love Parade from the beginning of the sound era and musicals in general with characters just singing straight to the camera (one could also use the backstage musicals like 42nd Street or the Garland/Rooney musicals as an example), and on the other hand you have Oliver!. This is the kind of musical where entire streets full of people contribute to a song started by a pair of characters off to the side, and you know what? The completely artificial approach enchants me, and director Carol Reed spent a lot of money to make that artifice as entertaining as possible. Oh, and there’s a perfectly competent, if perhaps overly abbreviated, Charles Dickens adaptation in there somewhere.

The story is familiar. Oliver Twist (Mark Lester, dubbed by Kathe Green while singing) is an orphan in a workhouse, get sold to an undertaker, escapes, meets up with the Artful Dodger (Jack Wild) and Fagin (Ron Moody), accidentally comes upon a man who knows his real parentage, has some adventures, and happily ever after. It’s one of those really famous stories that doesn’t really need summarization.

So, let’s talk about why this movie is so fun.

Carol Reed was an old hand in the British film industry, even going so far as to make one of the most famous Orson Welles movies that Orson Welles did not direct (The Third Man, a job Welles took to get financing to complete his version of Othello). He was something of an odd choice to adapt the stage musical by Lionel Bart, but he attacked the task with such style and verve it feels like he’d been making musicals his entire career. Reed was of the generation of filmmakers who understood visual composition so completely innately, that he brought pleasing aesthetics to the grungiest of locations and the most mundane of scenes. Imagine what he does with ornate, expansive sets and musical numbers.

And what he does is immaculate. The film begins with “Food, Glorious Food,” the song of the orphan boys wishing for more than gruel as they march down a large set to their cafeteria. It’s obvious from the opening moments that Reed was not interested in just replicating the stage play (sorry George Cuckor and My Fair Lady) but taking it as far as he could in the cinematic medium. The sets are too dynamic for a stage and work well for a movie. Reed cuts well beyond the two-dimensions to make the action feel alive and dynamic. It’s even fun.

With Oliver escaping the workhouse through the uncaring hands of the undertaker, he makes it to London and meets the Artful Dodger where he’s greeted into the life of the lower classes of London life with “Consider Yourself”, what might be my favorite musical number in all of film. It’s huge, spanning a few different blocks of giant London sets while the entire meat packing, vegetable selling, and bread baking communities join in to welcome Oliver to the family of London. Not only is it huge, fun, and massively impressive, it serves the purpose of actually being a welcome to Oliver from London. The welcome continues at Fagin’s hideout with “Pick a Pocket or Two”, another delightful musical number that uses everyone in sight (this time only a dozen boys instead of several dozen adults), and it’s also absolutely delightful.

One thing Reed does is keep his camera active in some very intelligent ways. He moves the camera not just to show off (I have little doubt that that’s part of the equation), but to move from one well-composed composition to another. The thing I most admire about the past couple of decades of Best Picture winners is the remarkable visual construction of the films, and, honestly, this feels like a real pinnacle of that, which is weird because I could have sworn that William Wyler would have been that height at some point, but he was never this combination of dynamic and precise.

The real menace of the film is Oliver Reed’s (Carol’s nephew) Bill Sikes, the thief who uses Fagin as a fence. Reed is a real menacing presence in the film, and he never lets up. The build-up of his menace is precisely constructed within the bounds of this somewhat thinly constructed story, so he ends up the only real menace in the film. However, that menace gets surprisingly compelling, especially late in the action.

Which leads me to the story itself. I think it’s really hard to adapt Dickens well to the screen because Charles Dickens’ books tended to be rather dense and deep affairs, a particular situation that, honestly, doesn’t lend itself well to cinema. David Lean did his best with his adaptation, but Reed’s adopts many of the same issues, mostly around the narrative use of Mr. Brownlow (Joseph O’Conor) and the very happy coincidences that bring him and Oliver together. It’s better in the novel with a series of connections combined with the fact that Brownlow isn’t actually related to Oliver, but the movies must make quick work of some things, so Brownlow, on whom the narrative relies so much, gets reduced to the barest of points.

Which leads me to Nancy (Shani Wallis). Nancy, being Bill’s girl, serves a pivotal role in the story, and she might be the best served character in the film. The presentation of the Best Director award at the Oscars for the year made fun of the idea that the female roles were minor (seriously, this nonsense has been going on for a LONG time), but Nancy is pretty easily the most multi-faceted character in the film. In addition, Wallis carries the role extremely well. We’re introduced to her with “It’s a Fine Life,” a very fun number about how much Nancy enjoys the life she leads, followed by “I’d Do Anything” where she shows her gentler side. On top of that, she gets, “As Long As He Needs Me,” where she details her submissive nature towards Bill, and you’ve got a character that accepts her station in life but also dream of more while is being loyal to her man. Compared to Oliver or the Artful Dodger, she’s wildly complex. Heck, compared to Fagin, who gets “Reviewing the Situation”, she’s got more dimensions. Out of the basic narrative components of Dickens’ novel, I think Nancy comes out best.

The rest, though, is fine. Brownlow is pretty basically presented. Oliver, the title character, gets lost in his own story. Bill is really compelling in his villainy mostly because of Oliver Reed (his only number got cut). Fagin is a close second to Nancy in terms of interesting complexity, though, and Moody makes the most of him, although his performance matches to Alec Guinness’s so much that it can become hard to guess where one begins and the other ends.

So, where are the joys of this film? Mostly in the musical numbers. “Consider Yourself” is the best number of the film, and it fills me with delight just thinking about it. “Who Will Buy” and “Oom-Pah-Pah” (intelligently repurposed into a distraction deep into the second act) duke it out for a close second in similar veins. The rest of the music is also great, just at a smaller scale (“I’d Do Anything” is a delight in particular while “As Long as He Needs Me” is surprisingly heartbreaking). There’s a moment of violence late that has a shocking punch considering how little is shown, and that’s a testament to Oliver Reed, the suddenness of the act, and the appeal we have for the character at the wrong end of the stick.

So much of the film is just a delight. Every single musical number makes my heart soar, while the actual narrative of the film is pretty much threadbare but functional, surviving on little more than performance. Sure, Lester was nine and could only do so much, but Jack Wild as the Artful Dodger was really fun, Moody as Fagin was multifaceted, Reed as Sikes was terrifying, and Wallis as Nancy was heartbreaking. Honestly, it could have tackled the narrative better, but I wouldn’t want to sacrifice the musical aspects of the film for it because the musical aspects are brilliant.

Rating: 3.5/4