Joseph Hardy (1974)
This Great Expectations[1] has turned out a bit like a Shakespeare adaptation might do if the adapter had only read Charles Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Sherman Yellen’s screenplay reduces Dickens’s novel to a love story. Themes other than the relationship between Pip and Estella, as well as the rest of the characters, are assigned strictly to the margins. Important locations like the blacksmith’s forge and Satis House are oddly spacious – a quality emphasised by Freddie Young’s lighting. The music by Maurice Jarre suggests bits that he decided not to use for Doctor Zhivago.
The role of young Pip is well played by Simon Gipps-Kent, even though he’s too mature for the opening graveyard encounter with Magwitch (James Mason). This sixteen-year-old actor speaks clearly and well but his voice also has a gruff timbre – it’s believably the voice of what Estella calls a ‘coarse boy’. Gipps-Kent’s closed-off, red-faced embarrassment and self-conscious movement at Satis House are better pieces of characterisation than anything that Michael York, as the adult Pip, achieves. The transition from boy to man occurs during a montage of shots of Pip working with Joe (Joss Ackland) in the forge. You want to laugh when York’s face appears because Pip becomes a gentleman of leisure in that moment: to indicate strain and sweat, York languidly pushes his hand through his hair. His male-model presence makes nonsense of the professed regret of Joe and Biddy (Heather Sears) at Pip’s quest to be a successful social climber: York’s Pip is always the glass of fashion. You can’t believe Miss Havisham (Margaret Leighton) could speak to him without scorn or condescension: he’s patently a worse sycophant than Sarah Pocket (Maria Charles), even though the film’s Sarah is a more blatant sycophant than the one in the novel. Casting York as Pip may have some vague box-office appeal but otherwise it’s senseless. In this Great Expectations, the lead actor contributes only to Pip’s snobbish, soulless aspect.
In contrast to Michael York, Sarah Miles as Estella does far too much and her actressy mannerisms are distracting. Estella’s revelation at the end of the story that she has always loved Pip but feared greatly that he should know that, and break her heart as Miss Havisham’s heart was broken, is meaningless here: as Miles plays her, Estella is driven off her rocker by Pip immediately. Sarah Miles hasn’t the weight to play heroines. Her Rosy Ryan in Ryan’s Daughter couldn’t measure up to the epic imagery with which David Lean surrounded her. Her Lady Caroline Lamb was such a fey, screeching madcap that you couldn’t understand what attracted either Lord Melbourne or Lord Byron to her. But Miles found a niche for her slender talent in The Hireling: her lovely, fluttering nervousness was perfect there. It contrasted with the rock-like presence and manner of the chauffeur played by Robert Shaw (and illustrated her character’s treatment of him as a piece of furniture). It was also well suited to the overlapping dialogue that barely concealed the tensions between the Miles character and her mother – their remote, fragmented small talk disintegrated into gibberish at times.
Sarah Miles plays Estella throughout – so from her very first meeting with Pip at Satis House. Her attempts at girlishness are excruciating. All she needs to do is insult Pip coolly and look beautiful but, as usual, she’s hyper-self-aware. Her face keeps breaking into half-grins and tiny suppressed giggles gurgle up from her throat. She moves her head from side to side, catches her breath, and moves her hands distractedly around her neck and hair. She has no poise, no allure as a paragon of a higher social order – which is Pip’s vision of her. Far from being Miss Havisham’s instrument to break the heart of men, this Estella is much more eccentric and offputting than her guardian (Margaret Leighton is curiously mundane). Elizabeth Haffenden and Joan Bridge has designed some effective costumes for Miles. An elegant montage describes the blossoming of the rose into English society: Sarah Miles wears a succession of dresses and, along with them, flattered or tentative smiles. Her stop-go-stop voice is quiet for once. Yet Estella doesn’t age believably. In the final scene, her costume is symbolically grey and her voice more modulated and sadly detached but Miles seems hollow in the wrong way. There’s no indication of Dickens’s early Estella – ‘self-possessed … and as scornful … as if she had been one-and-twenty, and a queen’ – at any stage.
It’s not only the principals who are physically miscast. Mrs Joe, for example – described in the novel as having black hair and eyes and a skin so red that Pip wonders if she uses a nutmeg-grater instead of soap – is played by blonde-haired, blue-eyed, creamy-skinned Rachel Roberts, whose likeable presence is concealed beneath her attempt at an all-stops-out sadist (which is wrong anyway). There is, however, a good performance from Anthony Quayle as the lawyer Jaggers, compulsively shifting his eyes as well as biting his index finger.
[1970s]
[1] Afterrnote: The film, according to both IMDB and Wikipedia, was made for television though it was released in British cinemas. I’m pretty sure I saw it in the cinema rather than on television. I’ve not classified it as a TV piece.
