O. K. ; production values , direction and much of the acting (Moody and Reed) are great but overall I'm left disappointed ;
Peggy Mount , a brilliant comedienne is sadly underused. Why not include the fun 'I Shall Scream' number which would
also have given Harry Secombe more screen time ? Leonard Rossiter too would have done full justice to 'That's Your Funeral'.
In order to fit in the above mentioned songs they could have trimmed 'Consider Yourself' and 'Who Will Buy ?' by half.
Oliver and Nancy are much too sanitised and saccharine. Georgia Brown was a hit as Nancy on both the London and Broadway stages so why not cast her in the film (Shani Wallace is all wrong). Oliver Reed's pungent and truly frightening Bill Sykes is the real deal but this creates an imbalance with the sweeter , chocolate-box aspects which stray too far from Charles Dickens' original masterpiece that paints a far from pretty account of Victorian London (Fagin is very suspect by today's standards).
In order to fit in the above mentioned songs they could have trimmed 'Consider Yourself' and 'Who Will Buy ?' by half.
Oliver and Nancy are much too sanitised and saccharine. Georgia Brown was a hit as Nancy on both the London and Broadway stages so why not cast her in the film (Shani Wallace is all wrong). Oliver Reed's pungent and truly frightening Bill Sykes is the real deal but this creates an imbalance with the sweeter , chocolate-box aspects which stray too far from Charles Dickens' original masterpiece that paints a far from pretty account of Victorian London (Fagin is very suspect by today's standards).