Who better to frame the horrors of a 19th-century workhouse than a Jewish director orphaned by Auschwitz? Roman Polanski’s gripping Oliver Twist is clearly inspired by his harrowing childhood, and he is unsparing about the brutality of the parish poorhouse. Despite being mounted like a period documentary, the film is not the cobble-licking grind you half expect. In fact, the power is in the witty detail: bewigged worthies tucking into Beef Wellington while Oliver comically demands more gruel; bracing slogans that look wildly out of place on these cruel walls, and characters as cherishable as moth-eaten dolls.

Polanski and Dickens had ringside seats at ghastly spectacles in different centuries, and the wisdom to wear their grievances lightly. You can’t fault the child-friendly satire. Ronald Harwood’s adaptation slices out the blubbery melodrama that matches Oliver to a “lost” family and Cinderella fortune, concentrating instead on the hero’s picaresque adventures.

Barney Clark plays Oliver just the right side of sweet. If he were a kiss-curl more cherubic he would be unbearable. It’s his evergreen view of the capital, with all its foibles and iniquities, that makes the film such a pleasurable watch. London is a place of endless fascination and scrapes; an immoral stew and a huge, heaving, Hogarthian scrum.

The fairytale irony is the curious security that Oliver enjoys in the most dishonest corners of the city after he’s scooped from a doorway by Harry Eden’s sharp-as-a-pin Artful Dodger. The thieving band of urchins shares a touching, tribal loyalty. Ben Kingsley’s Fagin is the magnetic joy in this backstreet kingdom. He is Polanski’s Shylock, with teeth missing and hair so whispy it’s hardly there. The rheumy squint, the frail arthritic posture and easy cackle hide a shrewd mind and a surprisingly genial heart.

But the film is impressively stingy with sentiment, and quietly scathing about the institutional hypocrisy of pompous beadles and power-mad judges. It’s impossible not to be affected by the climactic Newgate reunion between Oliver and Fagin, where one of them has found his marbles and the other has lost all his.

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