Left asking for more

Roman Polanski has made many more imaginative and audaciously conceived films than this conservative adaptation of Oliver Twist. But since he has expressed the hope that this will be a version attractive to children first and adults second, we shouldn't blame him for that.

If we don't expect anything as ground-breaking as Rosemary's Baby or Chinatown, we'd be churlish not to enjoy Ronald Harwood's more than capable screenplay and the way Polanski directs the classic story of the boy who wanted more, with relish and seldom wavering attention to detail.

Does it match up to David Lean's version of 1948? Not quite, since

Lean was a brilliant editor who could point up a scene superbly and had the services of a master

cinematographer in Guy Green, too. But it is more convincing than Carol Reed's immensely popular musical, Oliver!, which sentimentalised where even Dickens, the sentimentalist, feared to tread.

Polanski has the services of a cast full to the brim of reliable British character actors, who know how to dress up convincingly in period costume and to look fearsome, kindly, or ust eccentric as the Dickensian

drama requires. Barney Clark's effectively wan Oliver gives the film a holding centre, and Ben Kingsley's excellent Fagin vies with those of Alec Guinness in the Lean adaptation and Ron Moody in Reed's film,

without attracting the criticism Guinness did for seeming too much of a Jewish caricature. Kingsley's is perhaps the most difficult task and he achieves it without a hint of strain.

Elsewhere, there isn't a single offkey performance. Edward Hardwicke (looking exactly like Sir Cedric, his actor father) as Oliver's saviour, the kindly Mr Brownlow, Harry Eden's Artful Dodger, for once not overplayed, Jamie Foreman's Bill Sykes, and Leanne Rowe's fetching Nancy all give considerable pleasure. You watch the film chiefly for them, and the dozen or so familiar faces in cameo roles.

This is, of course, classic early Victorian Gothic, full of working-class

dirt, grime and sweat, as well as comforting middle-class solidity, and both production design and costumes are consistently impressive, even though Prague's sets make London a trifle Middle European.

But the workhouse looks horribly authentic and so does Fagin's den, where Sykes finally gets his just deserts. Only his death seems a little perfunctory, possibly because it was edited to secure a PG certificate.

If the film occasionally looks like one of those Christmas cards of a picturesque and rosier past, Polanski points to the rougher edges of the period too.