"The Cineguild director and producer, David Lean and Ronald Neame, have spared us nothing of the brutality of Oliver Twist. All the ugliness is there: the filth and cold, humiliation and hunger; the thrashing of Oliver; the savage beating to death of Nancy; the special lust which Dickens describes in italics as "the passion for hunting something." All these things are realistically set out in the film in pictures as remorseless as a Cruikshank drawing. The producers have even added two special savageries of their own; an introduction in which Oliver's mother is seen battling through the storm in the last pangs of travail, and a climax in which the child is forced to climb to the chimney-stack and watch Bill Slkes hang himself. The introductory scene, as it happens, is magnificently done; the roof-tops sequence seems to me both distasteful and silly."
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Women authors from EnglandWomen born in the 19th centuryFilm criticsPeople from ManchesterWomen journalists from England
Original Language: English
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"At the Films: Drawn by Cruikshank" The Observer (27 June 1948), p. 2
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C._A._Lejeune
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C. A. Lejeune
Caroline Alice Lejeune (27 March 1897 – 31 March 1973) was a British writer remembered as The Observers film critic from 1928 to 1960. She was among the earliest newspaper film critics in Britain, and one of the first British women in the profession. She formed a friendship early in her career with Alfred Hitchcock, "when he was writing and ornamenting sub-titles for silent pictures," as she later wrote.
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