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