Great Expectations (1946)
Directed by David Lean
In this Dickens adaptation, orphan Pip discovers through lawyer Mr. Jaggers that a mysterious benefactor wishes to ensure that he becomes a gentleman. Reunited with his childhood patron, Miss Havisham, and his first love, the beautiful but emotionally cold Estella, he discovers that the elderly spinster has gone mad from having been left at the altar as a young woman, and has made her charge into a warped, unfeeling heartbreaker.
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What critics compared Great Expectations to
The Tenenbaums are funny and strangely touching in the same way Miss Havisham is in Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations," as she holds onto her decaying wedding cake and refuses to wind her clocks.
The delightfully pert Emily Mortimer is the young Sophie, and Jean Simmons is her older incarnation—and Simmons is inspired vocal casting because her voice might quaver but her inflections are still those of the young Estella in Great Expectations.
It's great to hear Jean Simmons again, a gorgeous young woman back in the 1940s in David Lean's Great Expectations, Michael Powell's Black Narcissus and Laurence Olivier's Hamlet.
…rotting yet magnificent, more akin to David Lean’s Great Expectations or Robert Stevenson’s Jane Eyre than the B-movie aesthetics of Roger Corman or Hammer.
First, I love the Potter movies because they (the movies, not the books, which are a wee bit overwritten) remind me of growing up enthralled with English childhoods—not British but English childhoods, meaning that no matter how much a character felt like an outsider, she or he had skin as white as Jean Simmons in Great Expectations.
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The atmospheric look of the mansion and the cinematography was also inspired by Lean's Great Expectations (1946).
The atmosphere of the mansion and its deranged occupant no doubt inspired Billy Wilder's " Sunset Boulevard ," made four years later, with its aging movie queen in gloomy exile inside her mansion in Beverly Hills.
Rylance plays him as if he’’s a supersize version of Bernard Miles’ Joe Gargery in Great Expectations .
Made in 1946 in a peak period for British cinema that remains unmatched, Great Expectations is the masterpiece David Lean made as (his biographer Kevin Brownlow suggests) a way of stepping up and away from his years as Noël Coward's collaborator.
Imagine his eyes widening, first in mystification and then with a dawning delight, at Magwitch in the moldy graveyard, in “Great Expectations” (1946); at the sight of the famished boys who troop to their benches and their gruel, at the start of “Oliver!” (1968), chanting “Food, Glorious Food”; and at the matchless Murdstone of Basil Rathbone, in “David Copperfield” (1935), whose hatchet face all but cleaves the screen as he prepares to thrash David like a dog.
The film lacks the atmosphere of David Lean's Great Expectations or the weighty iconography of any one of a number of Christmas Carol s, but a sincere affection for and understanding of the source material shines through in its wit and good nature.
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David Lean (1908-1991) was considered by many the greatest British filmmaker of his time, although a better case can be made for Michael Powell , for whom he worked as an editor ("49th Parallel," 1941).
He achieved his great fame with a series of epics beginning with " The Bridge on the River Kwai " (1957) and continuing with a series of monuments: "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962), " Doctor Zhivago " (1965), "Ryan's Daughter" (1970) and, after a long sojourn with a doomed production of "Mutiny on the Bounty," " A Passage to India " (1984).