OLIVER TWIST

It doesn’t get more classic than David Lean’s dank nightmarish film-noir take on Dickens, which gives epic scope to a simple timeless tale. Victorian orphan Oliver (John Howard Davies) wends his way from cruel apprenticeship to den of thieves in search of a true home. Here, Alec Guinness is the quintessential arch thug Fagin and jowly Robert Newton is a totally greasy Bill Sykes. With expressionistic camerawork fitting its bleak industrial setting, Lean’s OLIVER TWIST is timeless in its depiction of weary, knife-edge street life…its unpleasantness lingers as it should.