Oliver! (1968)
There are musicals that feel like they belong to a particular moment, and then there are musicals that feel as though they arrived fully formed from somewhere outside of time. Oliver!, Carol Reed's 1968 adaptation of Lionel Bart's stage show, belongs to the second category. Based, of course, on Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, the story follows a young workhouse orphan who escapes his grim circumstances and falls in with a gang of child pickpockets operating under the watchful eye of the wily Fagin in the streets and rookeries of Victorian London. The source material had already been adapted for the screen several times over by the time Reed got to it, but the stage musical, which had opened in the West End in 1960 and crossed to Broadway the following year, gave the material a renewed vigour and a set of songs that lodged themselves permanently in the cultural memory. Reed's film was the version that brought all of that to its widest audience, and it arrived at a curious moment: the late 1960s, when the lavish Hollywood-style musical was beginning to look a touch old-fashioned against the grain of New Hollywood, yet Oliver! made the scale of the thing feel like a virtue rather than an indulgence.
Reed himself is a fascinating figure to have at the helm of a family musical. His reputation rested largely on tense, morally shadowed work, and if you want a sense of just how different his register could be, my review of The Third Man covers the film that many consider his masterpiece: a picture of fog, deceit and crumbling post-war Vienna that shares almost nothing in atmosphere with the Dickensian sing-song on offer here. What the two films do share, though, is Reed's command of physical space. He knew how to use a location, how to make a set feel inhabited rather than merely dressed, and that instinct is all over Oliver!, which was produced by Warwick Film Productions and Romulus Films on a budget that put considerable resources behind the ambition. Vernon Harris adapted Bart's stage book for the screen, and the screenplay preserves the essential shape of the story while finding room for the film's more expansive sequences.
The cast is a genuine ensemble. Ron Moody had originated the role of Fagin on stage and brings a performer's sure-footedness to it on screen. Shani Wallis plays Nancy with warmth and a belt that cuts right through the grander numbers. Harry Secombe is well deployed as Mr Bumble. Mark Lester, as Oliver himself, carries the emotional centre of the picture with an appealing, almost otherworldly quietness. And then there is Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes, a piece of casting that gives the film something none of its sunnier sequences can quite provide on their own. Cinematographer Oswald Morris, whose career ranged across everything from Moulin Rouge to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, shoots the production in a way that honours both its theatrical origins and its cinematic ambitions: wide compositions that give the choreography room to breathe, with a warm but not saccharine palette that keeps the darker material from feeling tonally out of place. The score draws on Lionel Bart's original songs, with Johnny Green handling the musical direction and adaptation, and the orchestrations have the full, generous weight that the numbers demand. Editor Ralph Kemplen, who had worked with Reed before, shapes a cut that holds the big sequences together with confidence, though at a running time of 153 minutes, the question of where those scissors could have gone to work a little harder is one that the film itself invites. Oliver! won six Academy Awards including Best Picture, a recognition that landed it firmly in the prestige category of the era.
For a companion piece on films from this same late-1960s vintage that were doing something rather different with genre convention, see also Point Blank (1967), and for another film that puts a young person's journey through a chaotic adult world at its centre, I also covered Hunt for the Wilderpeople, which shares that particular warmth even across a considerable distance in style and era.
I had not watched Oliver! since I was a child, and a conversation with my wife about musicals sent me back to it some thirty years later.
Coming to it fresh, two things struck me at once. The first is that it is timeless. The staging is grand, the choreography is excellent, and the songs are so catchy that I had half of them stuck in my head for days afterwards. The second is that it is long. Far too long. And that, for me, is the one thing holding it back.
There is a great deal to admire. Carol Reed mounts the whole thing on an enormous scale, the big set-piece numbers like "Consider Yourself" and "Food, Glorious Food" are wonderfully choreographed, and Ron Moody's Fagin anchors it with sly relish. And then there is Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes, who is, quite simply, a legend. He brings a dark, brooding menace to the thing that all the brighter, sunnier numbers badly need as a counterweight, and he is magnetic every moment he is on screen.
My one sticking point, then, is the running time. At over two and a half hours it is a serious sit, and for all that I enjoyed it, I felt its length in the back half, where a tighter edit could have kept the energy up. It is a lovely, timeless piece of musical cinema that would, I suspect, be even better a good twenty minutes shorter. Three and a half stars, catchy, handsome and hugely entertaining, and just a bit too much of a good thing.
Oliver! sits in a curious place in the canon: too polished and too well-loved to be easily dismissed, too sprawling and uneven to be called a perfect film. What it offers is a particular kind of cinematic generosity, the feeling that enormous effort and genuine craft have been poured into giving an audience a good time, and that effort is visible in almost every frame. Whether the length rewards or tests your patience will probably depend on how well the songs have already burrowed into your memory. It is the sort of film that earns its reputation without quite justifying every minute of it. And "Food, Glorious Food" will absolutely be in your head on the way home.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1968 | Watched: 2026-10-05
Trailer
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