Oliver Twist (1948)

Lean was a master of the cinematic art, and every lighting trick, camera angle, set detail, costume, and sound effect on display bolsters the sharp storytelling in this film. The stunning black-and-white photography in Oliver Twist helps to underscore the dreary unseen worlds of oppression: in the workhouse, at the factory that abuses child workers, on the streets where orphaned urchins are slaves to unsavory gangs. The dark and the light tell the story here, too. Bad things happen in the darkness -- both metaphorical and actual -- and good things happen in the light -- of day and of the enlightened mind. It's at night that a man murders his girlfriend. But the murder is never actually shown. The low-angle view of a raised murder weapon predicts the terrible violence about to unfold.

Sir Alec Guinness, who had teamed up with Lean for an earlier Dickens adaptation, the 1946 Great Expectations, is done up in a dramatic makeup job that makes the great actor resemble Oz's Wicked Witch of the West. His overdone nose, beard, and wig would never work in a color film, and is barely tolerable in a black-and-white one. He is a man out of place and time, dressed more like Moses in tattered robes than the leader of a 19th-century London street gang. The film doesn't identify Fagin specifically as Jewish, but the exaggerated hooked nose Lean chose for Guinness to wear caused controversy and accusations of anti-Semitism, unsurprising given its release only three years after the Holocaust ended. Anti-Defamation League protests prevented the film from being released in the United States until 1951. The edited version then cut most of Fagin's profile shots. Those have since been restored.