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The elemental prologue improves on Dickens with a concentrated pictorialism (trudging pregnant runaway, rain, thorns quivering in silhouette) of great importance to Kurosawa. The workhouse is vividly sketched (a banner reading "God is Good" is glimpsed through bricked arches), the eponymous foundling (John Howard Davies) rattles within like "a little bag of bones." From Mr. Bumble (Francis L. Sullivan) in the dungeon to Mr. Sowerberry (Gibb McLaughlin) amidst coffins, a lateral move, the boy's melancholia comes in handy at funeral processions, "a superb effect." Escape to London, where Fagin (Alec Guinness) lords over pickpockets, hunched, hoarse and scurvy. "Why, you're quite a literary character, sir." David Lean's most hallucinatory film, its expressionism keyed to a child's view of a punishing world—rapid subjective inserts in the chase with the Artful Dodger (Anthony Newley) lead to a punch in the camera's eye, followed by a woozy POV at the courthouse. Warmth and light with the rich benefactor (Henry Stephenson), a merciless chiaroscuro for the underworld of Bill Sykes (Robert Newton), whose very presence seems to balefully widen the lens. "Hold your tongue and keep your melting pot ready." The scene in the tavern, with Nancy (Kay Walsh) on a plane of crisscrossing vantages and raucous songs, is a virtuoso arrangement of perspective and tessitura. (The Hitchcock of Sabotage is indicated.) Distorted oil-lamp light gives way to creeping dawn after the murder, a charged tableau of billowing curtain, sprawled corpse, and trembling mutt. Guinness' rabbinical minstrelsy builds to a piercing cry in the face of the torch-bearing mob: "What right have you to butcher me?" Polanski studies it closely for his version, so does Spielberg for Empire of the Sun. Cinematography by Guy Green. With Mary Clare, Ralph Truman, Josephine Stuart, Kathleen Harrison, Amy Veness, Michael Dear, and Diana Dors. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |