Being from the East End he should have been a lot rougher accented.
"Oi've got a yoonicorn mate!"
This IS the fifties after all,so most child actors spoke what has come to be known as "BBC" English.Very seldom do young actors have accents like those in Leans Oliver Twist.
shareI imagine it would have been rather hard to find an actor so charming and young, let alone one with just the right type of British accent for the setting. I enjoyed the movie nonetheless - and anyway, who's to say whether his father (away seaking his fortune in Africa for the duration of the movie) didn't speak the same way?
Does anyone know whether the original book makes any particular reference to the way he speaks?
I'd also like to know "whatever happened to" the young actor, Jonathan Ashmore, who played the part and then just seems to have disappeared...
As 'Jaycey' points out in the "strange and fun" thread, the boy's mother also sounds middle class. With the father off seeking his fortune abroad, it makes perfect sense that this is a middle class family down on their luck in the postwar economic environment, making do where they can. Perhaps too, a native East-Ender may have been more cynical about the powers of a unicorn than a culturally displaced boy who attempts to sneak up on pigeons to catch them.
As to the use of colour film that some commentors have complained about, Carol Reed made many important films in a gritty B&W both before and after A Kid for Two Farthings (e.g. Night Train to Munich, The Way Ahead, Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man, The Key, Our Man in Havana), but this is a fantasy fable, and also is set in a particularly colourful section of London. The saturated colours seem entirely appropriate to me in this context.
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Just watched the movie on TCM. Loved it. Robert Osborne said this was only movie Ashmore made. He's now a college professor.
..I'd go to middle earth and look for Unspoiled Monsters. Then move to the country.
He never made another film -- no idea why not, since he did such a great job in this one -- but he went on to earn two advanced degrees in technical fields and was last reported to be a professor. Wikipedia tells it best:
Jonathan Felix Ashmore FRS* is a British physicist, and Bernard Katz Professor of Biophysics, at the University College London, Ear Institute.[1][2]
Life[edit]
He earned a PhD in Theoretical Physics in 1971 from the Imperial College London, and an MSc in Physiology in 1974 from University College London. He was Lecturer in Physiology at the University of Bristol, from 1983 to 1988. He read Physiology at the University of Bristol from 1988 to 1993.
He is Faculty of 1000 section head, for Sensory Systems.[3] He is a trustee for the The Hearing Research Trust.[4]
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*FRS - Fellow of the Royal Society -- the most prestigious initials in British science.
You question was explained in the movie. Young Joe wasn't a local. Remember, Mr. Kaditsky talks about when Joe and his mother first moved down there. He knew Joe's father from the time he was a boy and was surprised when he married Celia Johnson's character. The mother and son moved to the neighbourhood when the dad went to South Africa.
"Fortunately, I keep my feathers numbered for just such an emergency."