Dr Charles Drazin (Queen Mary, University of London)
David Lean’s 1948 adaptation of ‘Oliver Twist’ provoked so many protests against perceived antisemitism in Alec Guinness’s portrayal of Fagin that the film was with held from release in Americauntil cuts had been made.Yet twenty years later, in Carol Reed’s musical version of the film, the character had been sufficiently rehabilitated to win Ron Moody an Oscar nomination. This talk will explore the challenges of playing Fagin from the Lean film of 1948 to the Roman Polanski adaptation of 2005.
Dr Charles Drazin is a senior lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. His books on the cinema include ‘The Finest Years: British Cinema of the 1940s’, ‘Korda: Britain’s Movie Mogul’ and ‘In Search of the Third Man’.
This lecture series is organised by the LBI London in cooperation with the Wiener Library.
