Word: fagin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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OLIVER! A gleaming, steaming, rum plum pudding of a musical. Dickens' sociological sting is gone, but in its place is a Christmas package of breathtaking sets, period costumes, and a full-throated, joyous score by Lionel Bart. Best of a twinkling cast are Ron Moody as Fagin and a Toby jug of a boy named Jack Wild as The Artful Dodger...
Then there are the songs. "The Parish Boy's Progress" has nothing to sing about, but that has not stopped Composer-Lyricist Lionel Bart. Starveling orphans chant about Food, Glorious Food. Oliver asks Where Is Love? Fagin warbles, "Can a fellow be a villain all his life?" Well done? Indeed. Appropriate? In doubt. Putting trust in sounds and forms, Bart has obscured the message of "that great Christian," as Dostoevsky once called Dickens. The "demd horrid grind" is gone. In its place is solid, canny entertainment. Purists and sociologists will object as loudly as Christmas audiences will applaud...
Dickens was congenitally unable to invent villains less interesting than his heroes. As Fagin, Ron Moody makes the beaky, sneaky old vulture a tragicomic creature whose greatest thievery is that of the film. If he has lost most of the Semitism, Moody also has dropped all of the anti. Harry Secombe is the endomorphic Mr. Bumble to the burble, and Oliver Reed is appropriately thick and menacing as Bill Sikes...
Boycotted in Chicago. At least one thing can be said for the cover. It suits the spirit of the music inside. The album bristles with the brand of hard, raunchy rock that has helped to establish the Stones as England's most subversive roisterers since Fagin's gang in Oliver Twist.* It also stands in notable contrast to their previous album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, which ventured into the realm of electronic wizardry and psychedelic fantasy charted by the Beatles in Sgt. Pepper. Since that was an alien idiom for the Stones, they sounded pretentious and boring...
PERRY MASON (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). "The Case of the Twice-Told Twist" in which Mason gets involved with a gang of teenage Los Angeles car strippers who take their orders from a latter-day Fagin. In color for the first time after nine years of black and white...