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As a punishment for requesting a second helping of gruel, Oliver Twist is evicted from the foundlings' workhouse and sold by the beadle, Mr. Bumble, to Mr. Sowerberry the undertaker. After a fight with Sowerberry's churlish assistant Noah Claypole, Oliver runs away to seek his fortune in London. Here he meets a boy known as The Artful Dodger, who offers him lodgings in the deserted warehouse from which the elderly Fagin, a master pickpocket and receiver of stolen goods, supervises the activities of an assortment of young thieves. Oliver's first expedition results in his arrest for a theft committed by the Dodger; but when his accuser, Mr. Brownlow, realises the boy's innocence, he takes him home and raises him like a son. Cut-throat criminal Bill Sikes, worried that Oliver will betray him and Fagin to the police, uses his girl-friend Nancy, a cheerful prostitute, to lure the trusting Oliver away from Mr. Brownlow. When Nancy understands that Sikes means to destroy the child, she contacts Mr. Brownlow and promises to intervene; but Sikes clubs her to death and drags Oliver with him as he attempts a getaway over the warehouse roof. Eventually, Sikes is shot by the police while trying to leap to safety and Oliver is reunited with his benefactor, who has now confirmed his suspicion that the child is the son of his dead niece. The Dodger and Fagin, who has lost his slowly accumulated fortune in escaping from the police, set off to resume their life of larceny.

However euphemistically presented, such narrative elements as the exploitation of child labour, pimping, abduction, prostitution and murder combine to make Oliver! the most non-U subject so far to receive a "U" certificate. And an uneasy ambivalence that was already discernible on the stage in Lionel Bart's pantomimic adaptation of Dickens' moralising and melodramatic novel - child thieves zestily promising, in the spirit of some Wolf Cub initiation, to "take the drop" for Fagin, or Fagin himself, confessing in song that "I'm finding it hard to be really as black as they paint" - is enlarged rather than diminished by Carol Reed's cinema version. In the film that is obviously intended to become everybody's favourite Christmas outing, there is a heightened discrepancy between the romping jollity with which everyone goes about his business and the actual business being gone about. The workhouse of the opening sequence seems literally to spring to life from a realistic steel engraving, and John Box's splendidly designed sets - particularly of the dockside tavern and the twisting, rotted stairs that lead over a fetid canal to Fagin's hide-out - create a formalised, Dickensian atmosphere that is essentially at odds with the unrealistic cheeriness of the characters: Shani Wallis' bouncing Nancy seems more like a sympathetic au pair nursemaid than a sorely tried whore, and like Ron Moody's roguish and de-Semitised Fagin, she is only permitted to abandon this jovial mood for an even more sentimentalised lyrical one; which makes her murder by the "U" certificate Bill Sikes somehow all the more shocking. It is not the absence of realism (which is, after all, an inevitable characteristic of most musicals) but rather the lack of consistency that combines with the excessively amplified soundtrack to make the film so fatiguing. The musical numbers remain isolated from the story - set pieces injected into the narrative without really advancing the plot; and though the number of scurrying butchers, swirling milkmaids and prancing policemen swells in infinite multiplication with each verse of every song, the cumulative effect of Onna White's repetitive and muscular choreography is invariably more mathematical than dynamic. Mark Lester makes a winning and understated Oliver, and Jack Wild's tireless mugging creates an Artful Dodger who is as accomplished a scene stealer as he is a pickpocket. Ultimately, though, there is something inherently offensive in the spectacle of a chorus of pre-pubescent children swinging their arms and tapping their tiny toes in precocious imitation of Fred Astaire.

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