10-10-05, 9:03 am

Oliver Twist (PG) Directed by Roman Polanski


To tell the truth, Oliver Twist was never one of my favourite Dickens characters. Actually, I haven't really liked many of his child characters, considering them to be nauseatingly twee.

I mean, who could prefer Oliver, sweet Oliver to the Artful Dodger?

The name itself is superb - conjuring up images of mischievous kids that, in film terms, would not be seen until the Bowery Boys.

I should add that I have also had an antipathy towards most of the television and film adaptations of Dickens, since most characterisations of the working class are crude and patronising.

Certainly working people didn't talk the sort of mockney that Dickens imagines.

My view wasn't contradicted by David Lean's movie masterpieces Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, since they too stressed the middle class sensibilities of the central child characters.

Obviously, it's not simply the interpretation of the screenwriters. Dickens may have had experience of working class life but, as a journalist, he was sill writing for the largely literate middle class audience.

In short, as an experienced journalist of the Morning Chronicle, Dickens knew that his audience would more likely fall in love with a lad with evident signs of breeding than some snot-nosed guttersnipe.

Writing before Darwin and Marx, Dickens was still trapped within an ideology dominated by the idea that we are either essentially good or damned to be bad. By choosing orphans, he dispensed with class origins.

No, I'm not forgetting the fact that Dickens was an ardent social reformer, nor that the serialisation of Oliver Twist in Bentley's Miscellany was provoked by his opposition to the Poor Law Act of 1834.

Originally entitled The Parish Boy's Progress, it was intended to highlight the potential future for those who didn't have Oliver's good fortune - spending their childhood as workhouse slaves.

Dickens was employing a device to attract a wider audience, to gain sympathy for the cause.

Today, it would be like highlighting the plight of a minister's son on an ASBO with those having to survive a sink estate.

Which brings us to Roman Polanski. Considered a movie maestro when he decided to flee socialist Poland to sell his talents in the capitalist West, he's had a controversial cinematic career.

High points include Repulsion (1965), Cul-de-sac (1966), Rosemary's Baby (1968), Chinatown (1971) and, latterly, his Oscar-winning adaptation of Wladislaw Szpilman's account of the Warsaw ghetto in The Pianist.

Room doesn't allow for the turkeys, simply to say that, after a period fleeing Uncle Sam and not being able to visit Britain, Polanski decided to produce his Oliver Twist in the former socialist city of Prague.

Sadly, it's a rather pedestrian affair, essentially aiming to engage the younger viewer, with Barney Clark putting on a brave face as the eponymous orphan who made his name asking for more.

It's the first and last act of defiance, quickly becoming overshadowed by the company of the Artful Dodger (Harry Eden), Fagin (Ben Kingsley), Bill Sykes (Jamie Foreman) and his benefactor Mr Brownlow (Edward Hardwicke).

A synopsis is superfluous. Simply, after our Oliver escapes from the parish, he falls in with a den of thieves in London before being saved by a kindly benefactor who lives in a posh house in Islington.

Obviously aware of Lean's haunting monochromatic movie, Polanski pays his tribute with images of a limited palette before slowly morphing into fuller range of colours to create the impression of period pastiche.

It's an effective illusion until you look closer and recognise the unreality of having squeaky-clean cobblestones in a thoroughfare that would have been knee-deep in horse droppings.

Traditionally, the centrepiece of the drama is the thief-maker Fagin, since he's always been played as a wicked Jewish miser ever since Dickens played him that way during public performances of his works.

Under Polanski's direction, Kingsley keeps the image of a crooked crone, but tries to make him not so much sympathetic, as pitiable - somebody that Oliver could forgive.

Only Bill Sykes is kept as a symbol of utter wickedness worthy of the end that almost everybody prophesies as Oliver's future if he keeps up being the naughty boy that he never is and never will be.

Oliver doesn't conjure up the image of an angelic upstart.

From Morning Star