Ron Moody's Fagin is a musical performance that is also a piece of acting: a con man who has talked himself into his life, played with a clown's timing and a pickpocket's hands. Nothing else he did came close.
Fi1m perspective
The fingers never stop. In Carol Reed's 1968 film of Lionel Bart's musical, Ron Moody's Fagin is a bundle of rags with a pair of hands at the end of it, counting, patting, hiding, and the eyes above them are always doing sums. He had played the part on stage for Bart since 1960, and by the time Reed filmed it he had found every scrap of business the man could carry. Bart had written the songs straight. Moody, in his own words, "made him into a clown and turned the songs, which Lionel Bart had intended to be sung straight, into comedy."
The result is 'Reviewing the Situation', the best number in the film because it is also a scene. Fagin weighs going honest and finds each respectable trade worse than the last, and Moody plays the whole argument on his face, with the song as the noise a frightened man makes while he thinks. We went back to it expecting a music-hall turn, and what got us was the pause before each verse, when he almost decides to change and cannot: we laughed, and then we felt sorry for him, and the two feelings sat together for the rest of the film.
He came to it late. Moody spent the early 1950s in revue and stand-up and only turned professional actor in his late twenties, so Fagin arrived with a comic's timing already attached: the over-articulated cockney, the sudden lunge into a whisper, the habit of adding something new to every take. Directors and co-stars did not always thank him for the last of these. On stage a changed line is a colleague's problem; on film Reed could keep the takes that worked, and the restlessness reads as the character's rather than the actor's.
Afterwards the parts came, but they came in one shape. He was Vorobyaninov for Mel Brooks in The Twelve Chairs (1970) and Uriah Heep in David Copperfield the same year, and into the 2000s he was offered eccentrics and villains, often with a Dickensian cut to them. He turned down work that did not measure up to the part he already had, and the career narrowed accordingly. That is the caveat with Moody: the manner that makes Fagin so alive, the fidgeting and the schmaltz and the relish in every consonant, is a manner, and a manner needs a part big enough to hold it.
Fagin is big enough. Our review of Reed's film gave it a 76 and the performance most of the credit, and we stand by both. Put it on for the children and stay for him.
Biography
Ron Moody (born Ronald Moodnick) was an English actor, singer and writer. He studied at the London School of Economics before turning to acting in his late twenties.
He originated the role of Fagin in Lionel Bart’s stage musical Oliver! in 1960 and reprised it in the 1968 film adaptation, for which he received a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination. Other film roles include The Twelve Chairs (1970) and A Kid in King Arthur’s Court (1995). He also appeared in television series such as Murder, She Wrote and Starsky & Hutch.
Moody was married to Therese Blackbourn from 1985 until his death in 2015; they had six children.
