Oliver!

Ron Moody - Fagin
Shani Wallis - Nancy
Oliver Reed - Bill Sikes
Harry Secombe - Mr. Bumble
Mark Lester - Oliver Twist
Jack Wild - The Artful Dodger
Hugh Griffith - The Magistrate
Joseph O'Conor - Mr. Brownlow
Peggy Mount - Mrs. Bumble
Leonard Rossiter - Mr. Sowerberry
Hylda Baker - Mrs. Sowerberry
Kenneth Cranham - Noah Claypole
Megs Jenkins - Mrs. Bedwin
Sheila White - Bet
Wensley Pithey - Dr. Grimwig
James Hayter - Mr. Jessop

In Hollywood, where the director is always to blame - never the star, the property or the studio - Reed was widely regarded as a talent in irreversible decline. Few offers came his way, and when at last, after three years, he was hired again, it was by Romulus, an English house which had acquired the rights to Lionel Bart's Oliver!, one of the few English musicals ever to find favour with American audiences. The cleverly titled production firm - its founders were the brothers John and James Woolf (sons of C. M. Woolf) - sought American funding for Oliver!, but the money was hard to come by even with Peter Sellers committed to the Fagin role, American producers balked. At last Columbia agreed to gamble on the project, and regardless of the fact that Reed had only directed a few musicals. Reed was not straitened by the requirements of the star system and his carefully selected players, many of them veterans of the stage production, are perfectly matched with their roles. Sellers had long since moved on to more secure offers, so the role of Fagin went to the man who originated it on the stage, Ron Moody, a gifted performer who was equally adept at singing, dancing and acting. From this dextrous blend emerges a thoroughly infectious music-hall permutation of the famous villain. Softened considerably from the Fagin of Dickens's novel, Moody's rendering leaves the old man's feloniousness, cunning and unction intact, adding as well a colourful, roguish quality. This Fagin is a loveable scallywag. Under Reed's expert supervision, Moody consistently maintains a perfect harmony among the various traits of his characterisation.

Since Reed had an extensive background as an interpreter of children's problems, it is less surprising that he handled the children in the show as well as Fagin. Eight-year-old Mark Lester, who had impressed critics in Jack Clayton's Our Father's House, was chosen as Oliver. Lester's accent is improbably upper class, but in most other respects he gives Reed all that any director could hope for sweetness without glucose; pathos without mawkishness; spirit without heroics. Everything about him is unforced and natural; in neither his acting nor his song and dance numbers is there anything of the fabricated prodigy that makes so many child stars in insufferable. His dramatic sense always attuned to complements, Reed shapes this performance as a foil for Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger (Jack Wild), a wised-up street kid whose premature shrewdness is contrasted with Oliver's innocence and expressed in the Dodger's polished performing skills as well as his acting.

In a happy moment of nepotism, Reed's nephew, Oliver Reed, was cast as Bill Sikes, and the younger Reed gave his uncle exactly the right degree of slouching, scowling villainy. If this Bill Sikes is less menacing than Robert Newton's in the David Lean version of Oliver Twist, it is surely attributable to the discrepancy between a straight drama and a musical. Sikes is partnered with an admirable Nancy, Shani Wallis, who is as good in her ballads as in her up-tempo numbers.

To insure a Hollywood-calibre gloss on the songs, songwriter-arranger Johnny Green was hired as musical director. With his assistance, Reed was able to package the songs with maximum dramatic impact. 'As Long As He Needs Me', Nancy's ode to Sikes, her lover, is the exception; a less pile driving, dead-on presentation of this inane ballad would have served it better. But in his two big music-hall turns, 'You've Got to Pick a Pocket Or Two' and 'Considering the Situation', Moody is properly sly, exuberant and comically contemptuous, with a fine portfolio of raffish mannerisms and inflections. The major production numbers in the first half of the film, 'Food, Glorious Food' and 'Consider Yourself at Home' are choreographed with abundant, old-fashioned Broadway-style energy by Oona White. Here, as in all the musical interludes, Reed's fusion of song and story is peerless, the transition from dialogue to words and music, plus dancing, could not be smoother. By almost universal agreement, the high point of Oliver! is 'Who Will Buy?' the beautiful motley of street songs that opens the second half of the film. From the first a cappella, pure-soprano statement of the man theme by the flower girl in the deserted Bloomsbury Square, the music builds gracefully into an oratorio of the ordinary. The other peddlers arrive gradually, sounding the variations and secondary motifs, and are eventually joined by policemen, maids, lords and ladies. Finally the now-sunlit square is flooded with a river of humanity. There is no denying that the song itself is a derivative of Gershwin's street songs from Porgy and Bess and the treatment is hardly original. But originality isn't the only virtue in art. Bart's imitation is an excellent one, while the tried-and-true staging is superbly suited to the material.

The songs and production numbers automatically distance us from the real world and make the characters' problems a matter of artifice. Understandably, Reed keeps the energy level of his show as high as he can, but never allows more than an engagingly synthetic form of reality to break through; even the slum settings, which Dickens conceived as a conscience-rousing appeal for economic and social reform, have a story-book ambience. Although the novel achieves a weight and power that is, of course, missing from Oliver!, the maudlin melodrama that runs through the centre of the work is vastly more palatable in Reed's stylised interpretation.

Reed's work on Oliver! is splendidly seconded at the technical end by the extraordinarily sumptuous, painterly effects of Oswald Morris's photography, Terence Marsh's art direction and John Box's sets, which spread before us the full, bursting microcosm of nineteenth-century London. Naturalistically detailed, yet bathed in a romantic aura, the sets give us the smoky and decrepit atmosphere of the pickpockets' lair, the quaint Victorian bookshops and stores, the thronging, carriage-crowded streets, the patrician reserve of semicircular Bloomsbury Square. With effects like these, enriching every level of Oliver!, Reed and his marvellous team of craftsman leave the audience in a mood to ask, 'Please sir, can I have some more.'