12/2/2023 0 Comments Pickpocket movie 2012Every few minutes the story is interrupted by a spontaneous crowd song, the best of which-“ You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two” and Nancy’s “ It’s a Fine Life”-serve to introduce important characters. Everyone sings in this movie: the orphans sing as they sit down to their gruel the paupers sing as they sell their wares. And because this plot by itself could barely fill a two-hour movie, there is a lot of singing. What remains is a story of growing tension between Oliver and Bill Sikes and Nancy, who seeks to rescue Oliver and return him to the kindly Mr. Rose is barely seen Monks is omitted entirely. Lean’s pragmatic distillation of the novel would prove hugely influential Sir Carol Reed cited the 1948 Oliver as an inspiration for his 1968 musical retelling, Oliver! Reed goes much further than any previous version, in fact, in excising from the narrative any extraneous characters or subplots. The new state of Israel banned the film, but so did the state of Egypt-for portraying Fagin sympathetically. Yet the warmth of Guinness’s portrayal somewhat mitigated the accusations of antisemitism. Lean’s decision to give Fagin an offensively large prosthetic nose (against the advice of both Sir Alec Guinness and the film’s Jewish makeup artist) can make for uncomfortable viewing. With his stooped shoulders, comically large beard and twinkly eyes, he draws laughs with his slightest gesture. Sir Alec Guinness (a Lean regular he had played Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations) finds the whimsy and humanity in Fagin’s malevolence. Visually this version has no equal Lean’s innovative compositions and chiaroscuro cinematography turn Oliver’s travails into an expressionistic nightmare. Slightly less successful, though still a minor masterpiece of cinema, is Oliver Twist (1948). His Great Expectations (1946) remains the best adaptation of that story. Its major weakness is the location shooting one never forgets for a moment that Oliver is walking on American roads beneath American skies.īritish director David Lean has some claim to being the definitive director of Dickens. As a relic of early cinema it holds up surprisingly well. Lon Chaney plays Fagin as a feral creature, more monster than man, who seems to have been birthed fully formed from the London fog. Physically the cherub-cheeked Jackie Coogan ( The Kid) is a bad fit for the titular waif, but his large eyes and look of perpetual surprise help sell the character. In the restored film ( freely available on YouTube), the crispness of the black-and-white cinematography is remarkable. Most notable among the half-dozen or so early attempts is Frank Lloyd’s Oliver Twist (1922), a silent film thought to be lost for over fifty years until a print was discovered in Yugoslavia in 1973. It was both the first Dickens novel to be adapted for film and the first Dickens novel to be adapted for sound film. This cinematic quality has made the story irresistible for filmmakers. The workhouse, Fagin’s den, the death of Bill Sikes have become part of our shared cultural inheritance. In terms of cinematic images per page it’s rivaled only by A Tale of Two Cities. Between these two always surprising actors, pickpocketing almost certainly won’t be the only trick the big-screen Thenardiers have up their sleeve.We’ve talked before on this blog about the visual nature of Oliver Twist. In the highly-anticipated Les Miz movie musical, which hits theaters on Christmas Day, Bonham Carter plays the devious wife of an equally crude inn-keeper (played by Sacha Baron Cohen). The actress was able to correctly identify the exact location of a British reporter's wallet and phone, as well as the latter's make. She’s a bad sort and I learned how to pickpocket,” Bonham Carter told British newspaper The Daily Mail. According to the report, Bonham Carter demonstrated her hidden talent (“Not quite a talent, maybe a sideline,” she warned) at the BFI London Film Festival Awards, where she was honored with a BFI Fellowship. Talk about method acting! To prepare for playing the despicable Madame Thenardier in the upcoming Les Miserables movie, Helena Bonham Carter had to learn the ways of the wicked inn-keeper, which included learning to master the art of petty theft.
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