Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. Oliver! is the forty-first film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. **The Sound of Music will be reviewed out of order so we can see it in theaters The 1950s and 60s are often thought of as the golden age of movie musicals. Some of the most cherished musical films in cinematic history made their debut in this era. Originals like Singing in the Rain became classics and adaptations like West Side Story, My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music gobbled up Oscars. The musical era of classic Hollywood bowed out with the crowning of Carol Reed’s Oliver! as Best Picture. Adapted from the stage play of the same name, Oliver! is a telling of the classic Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist. Oliver (the cherubic Mark Lester) is a young orphan in a workhouse who is sold into labor for daring to ask his overseers for more gruel. Soon he is able to escape the funeral home he is laboring at and make his way to London. There Oliver finds a home with a group of thieving children led by the Artful Dodger (a sensational Jack Wild) who bring him back to their adult patron Fagin (Ron Moody.) Fagin, Dodger and co. teach Oliver how to survive on the streets until a pick pocketing gone wrong leads to the young boy being taken in by a kindly nobleman. A boon for Oliver, but a threat to Fagin and the nastiest of his grown accomplices, Bill Sikes (Oliver Reed.) They fear that the wayward orphan will rat them out and set in motion a plan to keep him quiet that threatens his newfound comfort. Oliver! is, in all, a pretty faithful adaptation of the Dickens novel albeit with a musical… twist. To call it a musical is perhaps an understatement. Many fantastic musicals of the era featured a bevy of songs ranging from mediocre to good to transcendent. The singing in Oliver! is near constant with every song going on at least a minute or two too long. Even the handful of good numbers — I particularly liked ‘Consider Yourself’ and ‘I’d Do Anything’ — stretch out for an extra verse that feels redundant. And those are the good ones. Far too many of the songs just fall completely flat. Contrast the uninspired lyricism though to the absolute spectacle of the choreography and set design. You may not get anything of Oliver crooning about his newfound fortune in ‘Who Will Buy?’ but the parade of street merchants twirling across the cobblestone road transfixes completely. Wild and Moody particularly get a ton of mileage out of the musical numbers through sheer exuberance of performance. The whole cast, save for one glaring exception, bring life to a plot that would otherwise be drowned out by the more bloated elements. While the aforementioned pair of Wild and Moody were deservedly nominated for Oscars — Moody particularly builds out a lot of depth in a character that was quite problematic on the page — the ensemble is also quite good. Reed’s performance as Sikes is just menacing enough to add some bite and threat to the story. Shani Wallis lends a tremendous amount of heart to Nancy, Sikes’s girlfriend and lady of the night. So much of why Oliver! falls flat comes from an underwhelming turn by Lester in the lead role. He is adorable and his innocence shines through but in every moment he is overshadowed by Dodger or Fagin or Sikes. Lester was only 10 at the time of filming and some of the issue may come down to Oliver being a more timid character in a world of big personalities. Still, it is hard to ignore the title character frequently fading into the background of scenes. While Oliver! is handsomely made and meticulously designed, it comes up short as both an adaptation and a musical. Forgettable, overlong musical numbers and uneven pacing squander much of the really tremendous work in choreography and performance. As such the era of big studio musicals ended not with a bang but with a whimper. 6/10
Comments
|