I’ve got to ask a question or two…

Just a couple quick questions here.

I caught Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Oliver Twist this afternoon, and as often happens before I can settle down to write my review, I feel a need to make a couple of lists.

First, I checked this IMDB page and a few others to see how many other adaptations of this Charles Dickens story have already been made, and there seem to have been well over 20 — but once we bracket off the silent movies, the TV shows, the cartoons and the modernizations, it seems there have been only four more-or-less straightforward big-screen talking-picture adaptations:

1. a 1933 version, which starred Irving Pichel — the future director of religious movies like The Great Commandment (1939), Martin Luther (1953; my review) and Day of Triumph (1953; this was the first feature-length “talkie” about the life of Christ in the English language) — as Fagin
2. the David Lean film (1948)
3. the Lionel Bart / Carol Reed musical Oliver! (1968)
4. the new Polanski film (2005)

FWIW, I know some might quibble that the musical was not as “straightforward” as the others, but it fits the label better than many of the other ones I’ve bracketed off. Are there any more?

The other question I have is this: In 1971, Roman Polanski directed an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Have any other directors made adaptations of both Shakespeare and Dickens?

I went to the IMDB’s “people working together” search engine and tried to match “Charles Dickens” as a writer with “Franco Zeffirelli”, “Orson Welles”, “Laurence Olivier” and “Kenneth Branagh” as directors — those being the most prolific Shakespeare adapters that I can think of — but the search turned up nothing.

OCT 4 UPDATE: My review is now up at CT Movies.