Oliver!

The storyThe lore 📖

Musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, a classic tale of an orphan who runs away from the workhouse and joins up with a group of boys headed by the Artful Dodger and trained to be pickpockets by master thief Fagin.

Oliver is an orphan in old London who gets kicked out of the workhouse for asking for more food, the bravest ask of all time 🥣. He runs away and joins a crew of pickpocket kids led by the Artful Dodger and the sus old Fagin. Sinister Bill Sikes is the real villain though. Big musical numbers, a lot of chaos, and Oliver just wants a home 😭.

What critics & audiences sayThe receipts 🧾

Tomatometer 90% Fresh #57 of 98 winners

IMDb 7.4 45K votes #73 of 98 winners

Metacritic 74 / 100 #76 of 93 winners

TMDB 7.0 / 10

Famous linesLines living rent free

Quotes via Wikiquote

Filming locationsWhere they shot it 📍

• Shepperton Studios

  Surrey, England

  The musical was filmed at the studio, with shooting beginning on 23 June 1967.

  Map ↗About this place ↗Source: Wikipedia · Shooting

Fun factsFacts that go hard 🤓

1. Producer John Woolf suggested Oliver Reed for Bill Sikes to director Carol Reed without knowing the two were actually nephew and uncle.Wikipedia · Casting
2. Ron Moody initially didn't want to play Fagin, fearing he'd perpetuate an unfair image of Jewish people, so he decided to 'forget Dickens and create a clown' instead.Wikipedia · Casting
3. Oliver! is the last G-rated film to win Best Picture, and it was the last musical to win until Chicago in 2002.Wikipedia · Accolades
4. Oliver! was the last British film to win Best Picture until Chariots of Fire in 1981.Wikipedia · Accolades
5. Pauline Kael hailed Oliver! as one of the few screen versions of a stage musical better than the original show, a show she suggested she had walked out on.Wikipedia · Critical response
6. In London the film played for 90 weeks at the Leicester Square Theatre and had been seen by 5 million people across the UK.Wikipedia · Box office
7. Choreographer Onna White received an Honorary Academy Award for her work on Oliver!Wikipedia · Accolades
8. The film was developed by producer James Woolf and director Lewis Gilbert; Woolf died and Gilbert moved on to another film, so Carol Reed stepped in to direct.Wikipedia · Production
9. Oliver! and Columbia's other Best Picture nominee, Funny Girl, earned a combined 19 Oscar nominations, the most for musicals from one studio in a single year.Wikipedia · Accolades
10. Roger Ebert compared Oliver! to The Wizard of Oz as 'very nearly universal entertainment' and later named it the seventh-best film of 1968.Wikipedia · Critical response