That same Stuart Freeborn also worked on David Lean's Oliver Twist film in 1948. For those unfamiliar with Oliver Twist, the character Fagin is jewish. Dickens refers to Fagin 257 times in the first 38 chapters as "the Jew", while the ethnicity or religion of the other characters is rarely mentioned.
"[Stuart Freeborn's] work met with controversy again as the exceptional character make-up of Fagin [...] met mixed reviews. "Some people felt the ((enlarged nose)) was racist", Stuart confesses. "But the studio wanted a look similar to cartoon illustrations that had accompanied the book. I tested two different versions. One with a realistic nose and one heavily exaggerated. At the test screening Lean put it to the vote and everybody chose the exaggerated one," Stuart laments. He felt he had no choice but to do it that way. To this day he regrets that so many people were offended by it. In New York, the performance was denounced as anti-Semitic, and the film remained unscreened until 1951."[1]
David Lean's Oliver Twist had already softened the image of Fagin by removing Fagin's trial death by hanging. Unlike the previous 1933 American film version, the 1948 film omits the scene with Fagin in his prison cell, awaiting his execution.
The way Dickens intended it.
Stuart Freeborn, who is "part Jewish" himself, [2] pleaded with the director, David Lean to make the character less Jewish, but to no avail.
In May 1947, the Production Code Administration (PCA), Hollywood's self-regulatory censorship body, said: "We assume, of course, that you will bear in mind the advisability of omitting from the portrayal of Fagin any elements or inference that would be offensive to any specific racial group or religion. Otherwise, of course, your picture might meet with very definite audience resistance in this country."
The PCA created the Motion Picture Production Code, or MPPC. It made a list of "Do's and Don'ts," in 1930, three of which are exceedingly interesting.
"those things which are included in the following list shall not appear in pictures produced by the members of this Association, irrespective of the manner in which they are treated:
[...]
5. White slavery;
[...]
11. Willful offense to any nation, race or creed;
[...]
[...]
That special care be exercised in the manner in which the following subjects are treated [...]:
[...]
2. (avoiding picturizing in an unfavorable light another country's religion, history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry);"
The MPPC helped to blot the memory of white slavery out of existence. It banned racism and xenophobia. In 1940, point 11 of the "hard code" and point 2 of the "soft code" were ignored in the (((The Three Stooges))) production "You Nazty Spy!" This was war propaganda produced prior to the official declaration of war between America and Germany.
The Code began to weaken in the late 1940s, when the formerly taboo subjects of rape and miscegenation were allowed in Johnny Belinda (1948) and Pinky (1949). At that same time, anti-semitism was considered "too offensive" for the public. The final blow to the code came in 1964, with The Pawnbroker, a Holocaust flick which featured bare breasts. The film was among the first American movies to feature nudity during the Production Code, and was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval.
In his 2008 study of films during that era, Pictures at a Revolution, author Mark Harris wrote that the MPAA's action was "the first of a series of injuries to the Production Code that would prove fatal within three years." The Code was abolished, in favor of a voluntary ratings system, in 1968. How fitting that Jewish victimhood be used as a justification to usurp White decency.
At that time, the Rank Organisation, which funded Oliver Twist, financed its top producers to make whatever they wanted, how they wanted. David Lean said at the time, "We can cast whatever actors we choose, and we have no interference at all in the way the film is made. No one sees the films until they are finished, and no cuts are made without the consent of the director or producer."
In November 1947, Rank's publicity chief, Jock Lawrence, wrote to the head of Eagle-Lion, Robert Benjamin[3]: "There are such problems… the Jewish one on Oliver Twist is a very serious one. It is something that I will have to show you here, rather than write them in a letter." He must have known that Lean had disregarded the Production Code Administration's demand concerning Fagin.
The Rank Organisation settled on a US release of September 1948. Following Lawrence's advice, it arranged a private advance screening for Jewish lobbying groups. The ((ADL)) considered the characterization to be an offensive stereotype that would be harmful in the light of "existing tensions." The New York Board of Rabbis went even further, declaring it a "vehicle of blatant antisemitism" that "would play into the hands of un-American elements". It wrote to the president of the Motion Picture Producers Association of America demanding that the film be banned.
As a result of the influence of the ADL of B'nai B'rith and the New York Board of Rabbis, the film was not released in the United States until 1951, with seven minutes of the film censored and removed, "to eliminate wherever possible the photography of the character of Fagin." In Israel, the film was censored and banned for anti-semitism. In America, it received great acclaim from critics, but, unlike Lean's Great Expectations, it received no (((Oscar nominations))). I wonder why?
On the other hand, the pre-war anti-German propaganda film Confessions of a Nazi Spy absolutely failed at the box office, yet it was named 1939's best film by the ((National Board of Review)).
The cover jacket of Celluloid Soldiers, by Michael E. Birdwell, reads:
"The Warner Bros. film studio," which distributed Confessions of a Nazi Spy, "embarked on a virtual crusade to alert [read: scare] Americans to the growing menace of Nazism. Polish-Jewish immigrants Harry and Jack Warner risked both reputation and fortune to inform the American public of the insidious threat Hitler's regime posed throughout the world. [...] the Warner Bros. studio marshaled its forces [...] push toward intervention in World War II."
Back to Fagin. According to the Jewish Chronicle, "Fagin had to be rehabilitated." When Lionel Bart the faggot-Jew wrote his musical Oliver! in 1960, he gave Fagin a lovable heart that was absent in both Lean's film and the original novel. Bart's plot rescues Fagin from the gallows that awaited him in the original novel.
Revisions continue to worsen. ((Roman Polanski's)) 2005 adaptation of Oliver Twist shows Oliver visiting Fagin in prison, to show how Fagin has received his due punishment. "Fagin, you were kind to me," says Oliver. They hug and Fagin offers a final gesture when he tells him where to find his box of treasures. "It's yours, Oliver, it's yours." What would Dickens have made of this?
Charles ((Drazin)) states, "Essentially humanist and progressive, I think [Dickens] would have understood why [the changes had to be made]."
But would he? Dickens called the Inuit "covetous and cruel." In response to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Dickens advocated genocide against the Indian race. On the 4th of October 1857 he wrote in a private letter to Baroness Burdett-Coutts, "I wish I were the Commander in Chief in India. ... I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested." He advocated that savages be civilised "off the face of the earth". In Bleak House Dickens mocks Mrs. Jellyby who neglects her children for the natives of a fictional African country. Dickens was a champion of the oppressed, but his humanitarian impulse only extended to other Europeans.
Peter Ackroyd, in his 1990 biography Dickens, notes Dickens' sympathy for the poor, opposition to child labour, campaigns for sanitation reform, opposition to capital punishment. He also asserts that "In modern terminology Dickens was a "racist" of the most egregious kind, a fact that ought to give pause to those who persist in believing that he was necessarily the epitome of all that was decent and benign in the previous century."
Ackroyd notes that Dickens did not believe that the North in the American Civil War was genuinely interested in the abolition of slavery, and he nearly publicly supported the South for that reason. Ackroyd twice notes that Dickens' major objection to missionaries was that they were more concerned with natives abroad than with the poor at home.
However, later in life, Dickens developed close friendships with Jews and created a sympathetic Jewish character "Riah" (meaning "friend" in Hebrew) in his novel Our Mutual Friend, whose goodness is almost as complete as Fagin's evil. Riah says in the novel: "Men say, 'This is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk, but there are good Turks.' Not so with the Jews ... they take the worst of us as samples of the best ...".
I guess Dickens wasn't such a great guy after all.
[1] Source.
[2] He admits his Jewish ancestry at 12:50 during this BBC interview.
[3] Probably Jewish, but couldn't find hard evidence.
[...]
2. (avoiding picturizing in an unfavorable light another country's religion, history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry);"
The MPPC helped to blot the memory of white slavery out of existence. It banned racism and xenophobia. In 1940, point 11 of the "hard code" and point 2 of the "soft code" were ignored in the (((The Three Stooges))) production "You Nazty Spy!" This was war propaganda produced prior to the official declaration of war between America and Germany.
The Code began to weaken in the late 1940s, when the formerly taboo subjects of rape and miscegenation were allowed in Johnny Belinda (1948) and Pinky (1949). At that same time, anti-semitism was considered "too offensive" for the public. The final blow to the code came in 1964, with The Pawnbroker, a Holocaust flick which featured bare breasts. The film was among the first American movies to feature nudity during the Production Code, and was the first film featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval.
In his 2008 study of films during that era, Pictures at a Revolution, author Mark Harris wrote that the MPAA's action was "the first of a series of injuries to the Production Code that would prove fatal within three years." The Code was abolished, in favor of a voluntary ratings system, in 1968. How fitting that Jewish victimhood be used as a justification to usurp White decency.
At that time, the Rank Organisation, which funded Oliver Twist, financed its top producers to make whatever they wanted, how they wanted. David Lean said at the time, "We can cast whatever actors we choose, and we have no interference at all in the way the film is made. No one sees the films until they are finished, and no cuts are made without the consent of the director or producer."
In November 1947, Rank's publicity chief, Jock Lawrence, wrote to the head of Eagle-Lion, Robert Benjamin[3]: "There are such problems… the Jewish one on Oliver Twist is a very serious one. It is something that I will have to show you here, rather than write them in a letter." He must have known that Lean had disregarded the Production Code Administration's demand concerning Fagin.
The Rank Organisation settled on a US release of September 1948. Following Lawrence's advice, it arranged a private advance screening for Jewish lobbying groups. The ((ADL)) considered the characterization to be an offensive stereotype that would be harmful in the light of "existing tensions." The New York Board of Rabbis went even further, declaring it a "vehicle of blatant antisemitism" that "would play into the hands of un-American elements". It wrote to the president of the Motion Picture Producers Association of America demanding that the film be banned.
As a result of the influence of the ADL of B'nai B'rith and the New York Board of Rabbis, the film was not released in the United States until 1951, with seven minutes of the film censored and removed, "to eliminate wherever possible the photography of the character of Fagin." In Israel, the film was censored and banned for anti-semitism. In America, it received great acclaim from critics, but, unlike Lean's Great Expectations, it received no (((Oscar nominations))). I wonder why?
On the other hand, the pre-war anti-German propaganda film Confessions of a Nazi Spy absolutely failed at the box office, yet it was named 1939's best film by the ((National Board of Review)).
The cover jacket of Celluloid Soldiers, by Michael E. Birdwell, reads:
"The Warner Bros. film studio," which distributed Confessions of a Nazi Spy, "embarked on a virtual crusade to alert [read: scare] Americans to the growing menace of Nazism. Polish-Jewish immigrants Harry and Jack Warner risked both reputation and fortune to inform the American public of the insidious threat Hitler's regime posed throughout the world. [...] the Warner Bros. studio marshaled its forces [...] push toward intervention in World War II."
Back to Fagin. According to the Jewish Chronicle, "Fagin had to be rehabilitated." When Lionel Bart the faggot-Jew wrote his musical Oliver! in 1960, he gave Fagin a lovable heart that was absent in both Lean's film and the original novel. Bart's plot rescues Fagin from the gallows that awaited him in the original novel.
Revisions continue to worsen. ((Roman Polanski's)) 2005 adaptation of Oliver Twist shows Oliver visiting Fagin in prison, to show how Fagin has received his due punishment. "Fagin, you were kind to me," says Oliver. They hug and Fagin offers a final gesture when he tells him where to find his box of treasures. "It's yours, Oliver, it's yours." What would Dickens have made of this?
Charles ((Drazin)) states, "Essentially humanist and progressive, I think [Dickens] would have understood why [the changes had to be made]."
But would he? Dickens called the Inuit "covetous and cruel." In response to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, Dickens advocated genocide against the Indian race. On the 4th of October 1857 he wrote in a private letter to Baroness Burdett-Coutts, "I wish I were the Commander in Chief in India. ... I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested." He advocated that savages be civilised "off the face of the earth". In Bleak House Dickens mocks Mrs. Jellyby who neglects her children for the natives of a fictional African country. Dickens was a champion of the oppressed, but his humanitarian impulse only extended to other Europeans.
Peter Ackroyd, in his 1990 biography Dickens, notes Dickens' sympathy for the poor, opposition to child labour, campaigns for sanitation reform, opposition to capital punishment. He also asserts that "In modern terminology Dickens was a "racist" of the most egregious kind, a fact that ought to give pause to those who persist in believing that he was necessarily the epitome of all that was decent and benign in the previous century."
Ackroyd notes that Dickens did not believe that the North in the American Civil War was genuinely interested in the abolition of slavery, and he nearly publicly supported the South for that reason. Ackroyd twice notes that Dickens' major objection to missionaries was that they were more concerned with natives abroad than with the poor at home.
However, later in life, Dickens developed close friendships with Jews and created a sympathetic Jewish character "Riah" (meaning "friend" in Hebrew) in his novel Our Mutual Friend, whose goodness is almost as complete as Fagin's evil. Riah says in the novel: "Men say, 'This is a bad Greek, but there are good Greeks. This is a bad Turk, but there are good Turks.' Not so with the Jews ... they take the worst of us as samples of the best ...".
I guess Dickens wasn't such a great guy after all.
[1] Source.
[2] He admits his Jewish ancestry at 12:50 during this BBC interview.
[3] Probably Jewish, but couldn't find hard evidence.
