Oliver Twist

by Junius

Roman Polanski’s Oliver Twist is tedious. He is relying on us just wanting a simplified plot and such well-known symbolic acts as Oliver’s asking for more. You might say it would be impossible to bring out detail of character like Charles Dickens does. But why impossible? In the novel, Mr Sowerberry the undertaker is moved to admire a button on Bumble the beagle’s coat:

“Dear me, what a very elegant button this is, Mr Bumble. I never noticed it before.”

“Yes I think it is rather pretty” replies Bumble, reckoning that conceitedness in this matter is allowable. “The die is the same as the parochial seal—the good Samaritan healing the sick and bruised man. The board presented it to me on New Year’s morning, Mr Sowerberry. I put it on, I remember, for the first time to attend the inquest,” and here Dickens is at his best, “to attend the inquest on that reduced tradesman who died in a doorway at midnight.”

There is no reason why Polanski shouldn’t take time to admire Mr Bumble’s button. The film would have been better for that dialogue, a conversation right out of the essential natures of two characters who, without such banter, were Dickens gets to the heart of social commentary through alert particulars, are mere stop gaps in a series of stop gaps called the plot. Polanski felt there was only enough time to do the plot. But who wouldn’t rather have three hours of real Dickens than two hours of Coles Notes?

It’s not even Coles Notes, for this version leaves out far too much. For instance, where is the key scene towards the end where the young Artful Dodger appears in court, wanting to know why his is placed “in that ‘ere disgraceful sitivation.” The jailer tells him to hold his tongue.

“I’m and Englishman, ain’t I?” responds the Dodger. “Where are my privileges? We’ll see wot the Secretary of State for Home Affairs has got to say to the beaker if I don’t.”

After the jailer has got through the evidence with suitable maligning opinions, the court asks the Artful Dodger if he has anything to say.

“Not here, for this ain’t the shop for justice; besides which, my attorney is a-breakfasting this morning with the Wice-President of the House of Commons, but I shall have something to say elsewhere, and so will he . . . . “

Such Cockney presumption is laughable, but it’s Dickens’s point that in this plea for legal aid, the Dodger is echoing and pushing forward Oliver’s asking for more. Privilege is everything in a class society, and a film of Oliver Twist should take every possible opportunity to be sure that that point at least is made.

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