id: Unidentified Film No. 244
director: Unknown
year: ca. 1910
countries: France?, Italy?, UK?
alternative titles: Oliver Twist (Given Title)

Synopsis: part of the story of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. Fragment. Two boys steal cutlery from a house. Oliver meets Bruno on his way to London. Rose Stocking, Oliver’s aunt shows Oliver’s godparents a letter by Agnes, Oliver’s mother, but the godparents laugh at her. Oliver gets bad company and has to go pick pocketing. The good mister Brownlow takes him home, but Bruno spies on them.

Possible identification: Storia di un orfano
Possible identification: L’enfance d’Oliver Twist
Format: 35mm
Language: Dutch intertitles
Length: 150 mtrs [circa]
Colour: b/w; tinting

Submitted by EYE Film Institute Netherlands
email: SuzanCrommelin@eyefilm.nl

Source notes
EYE Film Institute Netherlands

I am adding this comment on behalf of Luke McKernan:

I wish I could help with this one, but there's not much that I can say. It's clearly Oliver Twist, and it's not a version that I've seen before. The use of English on the book-seller's canopy indicates either a British/American production or else a French/Italian one for which a version was produced for the English market. I'm not so sure that it is a British film. It doesn't match any known British title for the 1905-10 period, and something about it makes me think it could be French. Pathe made L'Enfance d'Oliver Twist in 1910, but I'm more intrigued by a 1905 Oliver Twist made by Gaumont which Denis Gifford lists in his Books and Plays in Films 1896-1915. I can find no other reference to this, but there were British Gaumont productions around this time which would have been targeted at both French and English markets (Herbert Blache was one of the directors employed), not all of which are identified in Gifford's British FIlm Catalogue. And yet he lists this 1905 film in another catalogue. So it could be French Gaumont. Or could be something else entirely. I don't know!