Amazon.com video review:
Film buffs and critics can argue until their faces turn blue
about whether this lavish Dickensian musical deserved the Academy
Award for Best Picture of 1968, but the movie speaks for itself on
grandly entertaining terms. Adapted from Dickens's classic novel, it's
one of the most dramatically involving and artistically impressive
musicals of the 1960s, directed by Carol Reed with a delightful
enthusiasm that would surely have impressed Dickens himself. Mark
Lester plays the waifish orphan Oliver Twist, who is befriended by the
pickpocketing Artful Dodger (Jack Wild) and recruited into the gang of
boy thieves led by Fagin (played to perfection by Ron Moody). The
villainous Bill Sikes (Oliver Reed) casts his long shadow over Oliver
and his friends, but the young orphan is still able to find loving
care in the most desperate of circumstances. Full of memorable
melodies and splendid lyrics, Oliver! is a timeless film,
prompting even hard-to-please critic Pauline Kael to call it "a superb
demonstration of intelligent craftsmanship," and to further observe
that "it's as if the movie set out to be a tribute to Dickens and his
melodramatic art as well as to tell the story of Oliver Twist."
--Jeff Shannon
