Word: fagin
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...time he considered working in the movies ("On the stage I never seemed to have a chance to wear trousers"), and Director David Lean gave him the role of Herbert Pocket, the young swell in Great Expectations. The next year, in Lean's Oliver Twist, he played a Fagin that made him, for the first time, a favorite with the millions...
...interests of keeping "religious friction at a minimum," the Quebec Board of Censors barred the movie Martin Luther from public exhibition in that province. "We barred the English film Oliver Twist," explained Board Chairman Alexis Gagnon, "because Jewish groups protested that the portrayal of Fagin the Jew might lead people to think of all Jews as being malicious . . . Some Catholics might not get excited about [Martin Luther]. But there are those who might...
...last by U.S. moviegoers for what it is: a brilliant, fascinating movie, no less a classic than the Charles Dickens novel which it brings to life. Indeed, in mirroring Dickens and his illustrator, Cruikshank, the picture is faithful to a fault-hence the ruckus. Its faithfully repulsive portrait of Fagin offended some Jewish groups, who protested that the film would drum up anti-Semitism and succeeded in blocking its U.S. release (TIME...
...movie treats Fagin consistently as an individual (as Dickens did), never as a group symbol or scapegoat; it is obviously not anti-Semitic by design, and few are likely to find it anti-Semitic in effect. Attempts to suppress it, raising the issue of precensorship v. a free screen, brought many Jews to the picture's defense. The keepers of Hollywood's Production Code finally withdrew their ban last February, contented themselves with the gesture of cutting out ten minutes of Fagin's close-ups and profiles...
...imaginative best. He has molded most of his actors in the image of the Cruikshank drawings and handled them with the controlled flamboyance of Novelist Dickens himself. If any one threatens to outshine the others, it is Alec (The Cocktail Party) Guinness in the horrendous make-up of Fagin. To the character's sly, rancid evil, he adds a subtle tinge of homosexuality, an interpretive touch neither confirmed nor contradicted by the Dickens text...