I don't know how many versions of this classic Dickens story I have seen (I was even in one on stage in the early 1980s) but I have to give this credit for being the only one, to date, that has made me laugh. The cherubic young Dickie Moore in the title role was seven or eight when he made this, and frequently he looks like he awaiting instructions from an off-screen parent before commencing his scene - more often than not with an hugely inappropriate smile, or grin, or both... The rest of the cast do a workmanlike job with this super story; Irving Pichel is quite convincing as the manipulative miser "Fagin", as is Sonny Ray with his wobbly hat, as the "Artful Dodger" and a suitably sinister William Boyd as the villainous "Sikes". Subsequent versions are grittier and darker, offering us a much more malevolent view of London at the very start of the Victorian era, but this has a certain charm to it that makes the brief, quite well (and eerily at times) stitched together, adaptation well worth a gander.

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