Maintaining Character Relationships

  Streamlining the Plot | Maintaining Character Relationships | Reinterpreting Fagin | Cinematography

           However, not all of the characters that added to major themes were eliminated.  Of the characters that were maintained in the film from the Dickens text, many were portrayed very similar to those in the novel.  For example, Oliver and Noah’s relationship was nearly identical in the movie as originally described in the novel.  Noah feels superior to Oliver because he is a charity boy, not an orphan.  Like other characters throughout the story, Noah believes that the basis for his identity is his social class.  He also believes that because he has worked for Sowerberry for so long he will get the better work from him.  In both the movie and the novel, this is not so.  Oliver gets the job as a mute and as viewers and readers, we see jealousy from Noah.  One of the few differences with Noah in Polanski’s film adaptation was that Fagin did not have him spy on Nancy on the bridge with Brownlow.  Polanski had Dodger spy on Nancy instead.  He may have made this decision for the aforementioned reason: to make the movie more realistic to a modern audience.  Seeing that Noah was introduced at the beginning when Oliver lived with the Sowerberry’s, it would not have been as believable if he would have been brought back much later to be seen with Fagin.

Another relationship that Oliver had in both the novel and the film was with Nancy.  However, because of the film’s time constraints, the relationships seemed to develop faster in the film than in the novel.  In the original story, Nancy did not stand up for Oliver early on.  As she began to know him better, she started feeling sorry for him and realized he could have a better life.  She saw the innocence in Oliver that she did not see in the other boys living under Fagin’s wing.  Finally, at the end of the story, when Nancy learned that there was better out there for Oliver, she wanted to help him break away from the criminal world.  She even went as far as to say she would rather have Oliver dead than to be among the criminal gang.  “'The child…is better where he is, than among us: and, if no harm comes to Bill from it, I hope he lies dead in the ditch, and that his young bones may rot there'” (209). 

In the movie, it seemed that Nancy was immediately attached to Oliver.  When Fagin and the gang were playing cards at Fagin’s upstairs house, Nancy sat down by Oliver, put her arm around him, and taught him the card game.  The way she taught him and talked to him looked as though she already knew him.  Despite the differences in development between the two mediums, however, the relationship between Nancy and Oliver, in the end, was ultimately the same: Nancy risks her life for Oliver.