Old Yorker

  • Great Expectations (1946)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    David Lean (1946)

    This version of Great Expectations is widely regarded as one of David Lean’s best films and as a classic adaptation of a literary classic.  It may well be the former but I think it’s overrated, even if watching it again twenty-four hours after the 2012 remake leaves no doubt that Lean’s version is a relative masterpiece.  The visual scheme is nuanced, both spatially and tonally, though, as Pauline Kael says, the ‘rather creamy look’ hardly evokes the world of Dickens.  (Guy Green’s black-and-white photography won an Oscar nevertheless.)  It’s also something of a cheat when, in the film’s climax, the lighting in Satis House is crepuscular, which it isn’t in earlier scenes.  This is in order to give full impact to the moment when Pip tears down the dust-laden curtains to let daylight in.  The finale is the weakest part of the film – the least faithful to the book at any rate.  Dickens may have changed the original ending of Great Expectations to make it happier but when Lean has Pip and Estella embrace and caper away from Satis House under the closing credits the abrupt change of tone is false – lip service to what you think of as Hollywood requirements of the time.

    Lean’s storytelling is excellent and the ‘action’ sequences – the soldiers’ pursuit of the escaped convicts across the Kent marshes, the Satis House fire, the ill-fated attempt to get Magwitch across the channel – are imaginatively and expertly staged.  Yet the film is less atmospheric than Lean’s Oliver Twist two years later and the accent conventions of British cinema of the time blur parts of the main themes of the story.  If a character is not only essentially decent but to be taken seriously it’s de rigueur that their lines are delivered in RP.  This means that the boy Pip is as nicely spoken as Estella and, while Joe Gargery (Bernard Miles)’s accent is broad rustic, good, sensible Biddy (Eileen Erskine)’s is cut glass.  The same objection could be made to John Howard Davies’s speaking voice in Oliver Twist but that’s easier to accept as poetic, almost fairy-tale licence (and the voice goes with the way Howard Davies looks).  In any case, social climbing isn’t at the heart of Oliver Twist the way it is in Great Expectations.  Otherwise, Anthony Wager is excellent as young Pip and there’s some spiritual continuity between him and John Mills.  Mills is fundamentally an unexciting actor and rarely a daring one but there’s plenty to admire in his portrait of Pip.  Mills is good at suggesting Pip’s uneasy conscience, and at showing his positive and negative aspects simultaneously.  When Pip’s on his way from the forge to London his excitement is both appealing and offensive because you see he can’t wait to get away from life with Joe.  Even when Pip shows compassion to the dying Magwitch, there are still traces of distaste on Mills’s face.

    The real strengths of the movie lie in the character acting – especially the performances of two actors who went on to play very different characters in Lean’s Oliver Twist.  The standout is Alec Guinness, whose memorable entrance as Herbert Pocket – haring up the stairs to welcome Pip to his rooms and slowed down only by a door that sticks – foreshadows a physical recklessness which isn’t what you associate with Guinness and which makes this characterisation all the more special.  The surpassing, inventive wit is less unexpected but a treat for all that:  Guinness achieves that difficult thing – he makes affable human kindness richly entertaining.    Francis L Sullivan, the definitive Mr Bumble, is a superb Mr Jaggers; his obesity is a highly effective deception.  At first sight, Jaggers looks to be a figure of fun.  The more you see and hear, the more seriously you have to take him – Sullivan realises Wemmick (Ivor Barnard)’s description of his boss as ‘a deep one’ in a remarkable way.  Martita Hunt is a very good Miss Havisham – there’s a kindness to this woman which makes the unkindness of her plans for Estella more poignant.  Jean Simmons is marvellous as the young Estella.  Her merciless treatment of Pip when they first meet is powerful because Simmons fuses an almost generic spitefulness – the spitefulness of a precocious, self-possessed young girl – with something individual to the character.  It’s expressed in Estella’s proud, assertive walk – almost a march – as well as her incisive line readings. It was a pity that Simmons, seventeen at the time, was a bit too young to play the role all the way through.  In comparison with her, the stiffly ladylike Valerie Hobson is uninteresting as the adult Estella.  Finlay Currie is a compelling, physically imposing Magwitch.  The screenplay is by Lean, the producers Anthony Havelock-Allen and Ronald Neame, and Kay Walsh (Lean’s wife at the time, who went on to play Nancy in Oliver Twist).

    20 December 2012

  • Great Expectations (2012)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mike Newell (2012)

    My father loved Dickens.  I was never sure how many of the novels he’d read; I am sure it was plenty more than I’ve managed.  Great Expectations is perhaps the only Dickens that I’ve reread.  I remember that when I enthused about it my father disagreed.  That was what tended to happen when I enthused about anything but in this case I can remember what he said to explain his lukewarmness:  ‘Pip’s a creep’.  A dramatisation of the novel is likely to be seriously weakened if the actor playing Philip Pirrip suggests nothing more than a creep.   That certainly wasn’t the case in the 1999 BBC mini-series:  Ioan Gruffudd, with his complicated charm and emotional alertness, was the best Pip I’ve seen.  In this latest cinema version of Great Expectations, the boy Pip is played by Toby Irvine, in his first movie.  He grows into Toby’s brother Jeremy, already familiar from War Horse and who’ll be seen next as the young Eric Lomax (he ages into Colin Firth) in The Railway Man.   It’s the younger brother who’s the more expressive.   Toby Irvine is good at suggesting feelings in Pip that he wants to conceal (shame, when Estella insults him on his early visits to Satis House) or of which he’s at first not fully conscious (dissatisfaction with life with Joe Gargery).   When Jeremy Irvine first appears, Pip is hard at work at the forge.  The sound of the hammer blows gets across the relentless, erosive labour that seems to be Pip’s lot in life.   But Irvine’s appearance immediately strikes a false note.  He’s lit so that the glow of the furnace emphasises his film-star good looks.  Even if you’d never read the novel, the news of Pip’s sudden prospects in a world beyond the smithy would come as no surprise.  Jeremy Irvine was likeable in War Horse but he’s not able – or not yet able (he’s twenty-two) – to fuse a character’s conflicting feelings satisfyingly.  He switches between shocked innocence and snobbishness without making any connection between them.  In the middle ground of Pip’s personality, he emotes conscientiously but imprecisely.  Irvine goes an unfortunately long way towards vindicating my father’s summary of Pip.

    To be fair to Jeremy Irvine, the direction and screenplay don’t help him.   The challenge of compressing the novel into 128 minutes shouldn’t be underestimated but Mike Newell’s beat-the-clock approach gives the impression he had little more than two hours of shooting time.  Swift cutting is one thing (the BBC’s 2005 Bleak House, though excellent and innovative, hasn’t been a wholly good influence on screen Dickens) but the conversations often seem rushed and the actors’ timing off.  This is a particular problem with the less experienced players, especially the child Estella (Helena Barlow), who doesn’t feel her lines.  One of the regrettable omissions from David (One Day) Nicholls’s script is Dolge Orlick and what happens to the termagant Mrs Joe, for which Orlick may be responsible[1].  This is a visually dark-toned Great Expectations but I missed the metaphorical darkness of Orlick’s character.  Sally Hawkins is a refreshingly pretty Mrs Joe but her vividly apoplectic quality is largely wasted as we never see the character reduced to silence.  (Her death is simply reported.)   And though Ewen Bremner is good as Wemmick, retaining the Aged Parent (Frank Dunne) is pointless if you’re going to reduce the role to a few seconds of the Wemmicks’ domestic routine.  (Once Jeremy Irvine nods his head vigorously at Aged P and the cannon’s been fired, Newell considers the job done.)  What’s most frustrating is that precious screen time is wasted on other things.  In a lame effort to make the material ‘filmic’, Newell and Nicholls provide uninspired reconstructions of Miss Havisham’s wedding morning, Magwitch and Compeyson in the dock together, etc.  These sequences are superfluous anyway when the characters still explain to each other and to us what happened before the story began.  In what appears a similarly clumsy attempt to keep Dickens socially ‘relevant’, several minutes are spent staging gatherings of ‘The Finches of the Grove’ with their Bullingdon Club associations.

    Mike Newell comes up with some striking images – the horribly burned face of the dying Miss Havisham, the massive ship hulk bearing down on Pip and Magwitch at the climax of the failed attempt to get the latter out of England.  Newell also deserves credit for some unpredictable casting:  it’s unfortunate that his lack of patience or imagination or both means this doesn’t pay dividends.  I liked Ralph Fiennes’s Magwitch in the opening scenes; he makes you realise that it’s Magwitch’s desperation that makes him more frightening.   As the film goes on, however, Fiennes’ portrait becomes more conventional – in contrast, Robbie Coltrane’s Jaggers is increasingly persuasive.  Helena Bonham Carter’s relative youth enables her to show that trauma rather than time has withered Miss Havisham.   Bonham Carter is erratic, though:  the depth of her loathing of life and herself registers strongly when she snaps back at Pip, ‘Who am I, for God’s sake, that I should be kind?!’ but she’s also mannered in a self-conscious way.  A larger problem is that this casting turns out, in visual terms anyway, to be less original than it sounded:  Helena Bonham Carter has looked so extraordinary in Tim Burton films in recent years that her make-up and costume here don’t have a lot of impact.   Holliday Grainger is an odd Estella.  She doesn’t have much variety but her face and bearing make Estella seem trapped and old beyond her years, which feels right.  David Walliams, needless to say, delivers a showy cartoon Pumblechook; he’s instantly tedious.  There are two excellent supporting performances, though. Jason Flemyng plays Joe Gargery with a fine, affecting sensitivity – his Joe is a reminder that you don’t need brains to get your feelings hurt.   Alec Guinness’s achievement in making Herbert Pocket not merely tolerable but just about delightful is perhaps the very best thing in David Lean’s Great Expectations.  Olly Alexander isn’t in that class but he’s genuinely and easily eccentric in the role (and Charlie Callaghan as the child Herbert also does well).

    19 December 2012

    [1] I hadn’t realised, until I watched the 1946 film again the following day, how closely Newell and Nicholls follow the David Lean version – not only in what their adaptation retains of and omits from the novel but occasionally in shot selection too.

     

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