Dickens, David Lean, and After: Twenty-First-Century Adaptations of Oliver Twist
Critics of adaptations of Dickens’s fiction have long discounted the possibility (or viability) of measuring their quality in terms of faithfulness to the original novels. Yet despite scholarship by the likes of Grahame Smith, Joss Marsh and Brian McFarlane in this ‘anti-fidelity’ vein, there has be...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2012-01-01
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| Series: | Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens |
| Online Access: | http://journals.openedition.org/cve/12239 |
| Summary: | Critics of adaptations of Dickens’s fiction have long discounted the possibility (or viability) of measuring their quality in terms of faithfulness to the original novels. Yet despite scholarship by the likes of Grahame Smith, Joss Marsh and Brian McFarlane in this ‘anti-fidelity’ vein, there has been relatively little sustained discussion of intertextual echoes between different adaptations of the same text. This essay provides one such account by analysing the influence of David Lean’s classic 1948 Cineguild production on subsequent films, with a particular focus on two twenty-first-century examples. The dramatic and aesthetic effectiveness of Lean’s Oliver Twist might be seen, in a sense, as an improvement on the efforts of an inexperienced writer, and it has certainly had a strong effect on the novel’s life on film and television. In interestingly varied ways, as this essay will show, subsequent filmmakers must offer a response to the David Lean version as well as providing a reinterpretation of the novel itself. |
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| ISSN: | 0220-5610 2271-6149 |