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6 The beautiful english boy Mark Lester and Oliver! Dianne Brooks Oliver! (1968) was more popular in the United States than in Britain, despite its English cast, English director, English subject matter, English setting, and original author Charles Dickens. In this sense it may be linked, tenuously, to other British-boy-blockbusters like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) or The Lord of the Rings (2001–2003), which rely on the sale and consumption of an idealized English boyness. I say tenuously because although Oliver! and Harry Potter are about orphan boys in fantasy worlds, their differences trump their similarities. In some ways Oliver! has more in common with the staid and insightfully romantic musings on Victorianism presented by the MerchantIvory franchise. Oliver!’s setting is specific in a way in which Harry Potter’s is not: despite the music and dancing you can’t take the Victorianism and even the Dickensian critique of such entirely out of the film. Harry Potter is much less specific in its time and place: it is a blend of the contemporary with the myth and magic of the pre-Christian past. Where Harry Potter is pagan, Oliver! can’t entirely dispense with Dickens’s Christian redemption even if it does turn the Jewish Fagin (whom Dickens made emphatically evil) into its hero. Oliver! is the last in a line of big musicals with a more or less specific nod to the nineteenth-century Old World and its values and aesthetic, not unlike its predecessors, The Sound of Music (1965), My Fair Lady (1964), Gigi (1958), and even Oklahoma! (1955). These films are adult romantic melodramas linked to an era that is now too distant for contemporary children to recognize. But the big musical has long since died and the fantasies of childhood created by baby boomers tend toward moral lessons dressed in epic Arthurian legend. In the years since the release of Oliver! the film industry has profoundly changed. 1968 was a time of transition. The studio system was over, films were searching for new financing and new mar114 Mark Lester and Oliver! 115 kets. But it was not until the mid-to-late 1970s that boys were identified and targeted as an important film market niche. Oliver! predates this discovery and is therefore in the tradition of the “family” film that gives something for adults to engage with (Dickens) while at the same time appealing to children (kids singing and dancing). Films like Harry Potter are directly marketed to children and to the child-in-all-of-us-just-can’t-grow-up baby boomers (apparently tons of adults are devoted readers of the Harry Potter books). So although parents will still make the decision as to whether a child will go to the film, contemporary family films are more direct in their address to children as consumers than in the past. One example of this might be the casting credits on Potter, which place the three young stars’ names above the title and above such well-established luminaries as Maggie Smith, Richard Harris, and John Cleese. In 1968, no one would have thought to put Mark Lester (Oliver) and Jack Wild (The Artful Dodger) ahead of the adult stars; they are instead “introduced” after Ron Moody who plays Fagin and Oliver Reed who plays Bill Sikes, because they do not drive the story, being minor characters in terms of dialogue and action. Oliver successfully sold—and continues to successfully sell— a version of English boyhood that was more closely tied to the Dickens novel than one might think. Potter’s fantasy English boy will become the all-powerful knight, Oliver’s will become the Victorian gentleman. Despite its popularity with kids, its career boost for Mark Lester in particular, and its periodic revivals on Broadway and in dance recitals, it’s not really so very kid-centered, that is, it’s not as kid-centered as contemporary films that depict childhood and that are more directly aimed at the boy demographic. Harry Potter’s witchy world is an idealized public school, except with girls, where the kids wander around and make and enforce rules much as in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1951). But in Oliver! neither the workhouse nor the den of thieves is portrayed as anything like a gentleman’s school or club; it’s almost as if Mark Lester went missing from that sort of a place. In Potter, the kids take power away from the adults...

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