Jackie Coogan, enjoying his first flush of fame after Chaplin's
The Kid, makes for a sunny, well-scrubbed Oliver in this silent 1922 adaptation of the Dickens classic. The other notable player is Lon Chaney, going in for anti-Semitic caricature as the whiskered, hook-nosed Fagin. Frank Lloyd directed, eight years into a career that would stretch into the 50s and produce exactly one highlight: the Charles Laughton version of
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935).
By
J.R. Jones