Oliver Twist

London’s soot-choked alleys, rendered in chiaroscuro pools of gaslight and murk, swallow a pale waif whose very name—Oliver Twist—sounds like a dare. The 1922 adaptation, distilled from Dickens’s sprawling social fresco, charts the boy’s vertiginous descent from parish indenture to the pick-pocketing guild ruled by Fagin, here incarnated by Lon Chaney with a leer as sharp as a shiv. Jackie Coogan’s moon-wide eyes register each fresh cruelty: the workhouse’s ladle withheld, the coffin-shaped cellar where orphans sleep, the moment his palm first closes around a silk handkerchief not his own. Around him swirl a carnival of grotesques—Bill Sikes’s hulking menace, Nancy’s guttering compassion, the Artful Dodger’s top-hatted bravura—each silhouetted against a city that grinds innocence into currency. Frank Lloyd compresses the novel’s sinews into brisk, breathless reels, letting the camera prowl like a fences’ lookout, so every cutpurse flourish or rain-slick rooftop escape feels etched onto celluloid with acid. The result is a fever dream of Victorian penury, equal parts morality tale and Grand Guignol spectacle, whose final-act inheritance feels less like redemption than a macabre joke played by a class system that first starves its children, then crowns one of them with gold.