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The phrase “read the book, see the movie” was something you heard a lot in the second half of the 20th century, and using a work of popular literature as the basis of a film was once considered a badge of honor. There are a few classic authors who can still hold that kind of cache today – Jane Austen, anyone? – but one of the biggies in Hollywood’s golden age was Charles Dickens, who inspired numerous films based on his works both short (A Christmas Carol) and epically long (Bleak House). And for my money, no one could adapt Dickens better than David Lean.
A former editor, Lean sprang to prominence as one of England’s premiere filmmakers during World War II with films like Blithe Spirit and Brief Encounter (both 1945), not to mention his accomplished debut, In Which We Serve (1942). With the war over, Lean embarked on a pair of back-to-back Dickens films, both of which are absolutely superb: Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). Strangely enough, Lean wasn’t even all that familiar with Dickens when he was taken to the theater in 1939 (well before he’d directed his first film) by wife Kay Walsh to see a stage version of Great Expectations in 1939, featuring Martita Hunt (who reprised her role here) and a young up and comer named Alec Guinness, who had just a tiny bit of an impact on Lean’s career.
An unusual take on the beloved rags-to-riches formula, Dickens’s novel (and its various iterations on stage and screen) is one of the author’s key works and among the most entertaining. A commentary on social consciousness, the story shows how we’re all interconnected in ways we can’t immediately perceive. That message remains timely today and may account for why Lean’s version still feels so vibrant and immediate, grabbing you by the neck with its beautifully atmospheric graveyard opening as we meet young Pip (John Mills) during an encounter that will have a profound effect on the course of his life. Soon after he crosses paths with two others who will become vitally important, beautiful young Estella (Jean Simmons) and her cynical, man-hating guardian, Miss Havisham (Hunt), who’s become mentally and emotionally diseased over time after a planned wedding gone wrong. The original novel (Dickens’s penultimate) is one of his longer efforts, easily passing 500 pages regardless of the printing; however, Lean and his co-scenarists (including Walsh, Cecil McGivern, Anthony Havelock-Allan, and future director and former Lean cinematographer Ronald Neame) keep the story moving at a very fast clip, retaining everything that makes the book effective while distilling it into a gripping chain of incidents that all pay off in the finale.
What’s especially fascinating to film fans about Lean’s adaptation (the third and most famous cinematic version of the story) is how close he comes to making a horror film; it’s actually a bit of a shame he never tackled a full-fledged genre film as he could have done wonders with the classic British ghost story tradition (something Blithe Spirit also demonstrated in an oblique way). The graveyard scene is an obvious tip-off, as good as the one in Frankenstein (1931) and packing in the same visual power as Vampyr (1932). (Interestingly, Valerie Hobson, who plays the adult Estella, had appeared in two other Universal horror films a year earlier, Bride of Frankenstein and Werewolf of London.) However, the film is loaded with beautiful macabre touches, most obviously in the decrepit, warped terrain of the Havisham home, where society’s most celebrated romantic tradition has become the symbol of horror and suppression.
The rest of Pip’s journey is an often disorienting one, with a nameless benefactor pushing him along like a supernatural god before the big revelation at the end puts all the pieces into place; however, for much of the running time it captures the feeling of a character being pushed, pulled and prodded by uncanny forces, albeit to a destiny here that’s far from the doom you’d find had this story unfolded in the hands of a different author. Lean’s keen visual sense here injects the DNA that would pay off in spades over the next two decades, most obviously in the peak period of Hammer horror films (Terence Fisher could easily be the disciple of Lean in his pre-epic period, and Freda Jackson from this film was given a crackerjack role in his Brides of Dracula in 1960) and the wave of European horror films kicked off in the 1960s, most obviously influencing the cobweb-laden, sickly romanticism of Antonio Margheriti’s Castle of Blood (1964) and Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil (1973).
It’s fascinating to note that while Lean’s Oliver Twist would lead to many significant cinematic followers, most notably Carol Reed’s Oscar-winning Oliver! (1968), this would be the final English-language big screen version of Great Expectations for over half a century. (However, various TV productions have popped up around the world like clockwork at least once or twice each decade). It wasn’t until near the turn of the millennium that Alfonso Cuarón would undertake his own idiosyncratic modernized take on the novel with his 1998 film starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow, transposing the locations to Florida and New York and changing most of the character names in the process. The end result is an odd but sometimes brilliant meditation on the source material, hitting most of the major plot points but rendering it in such a splashy, colorful fashion (with an admittedly spectacular soundtrack) that it’s ultimately difficult to assess at all as a Dickens adaptation, even further removed than something like Oliver & Company (1988). (Perhaps the weirdest footnote about the film may be the fact that the screenplay wound up wandering so far afield that it even inspired a new novelization by Deborah Chiel! Anyone who picked up the Dickens book looking for to relive the experience of the film would have no doubt been left very confused.) A more faithful version was lensed in 2012 by Mike Newell (with Helena Bonham Carter making an ideally cast Miss Havisham), adequately adhering to the time period and events of the book but never soaring to the heights of truly great filmmaking. However, no one else has tried to recapture the sinister and stylized flourishes that Lean introduced to his film, just part of the reason it remains one of the most satisfying literary adaptations of all time.
Nathaniel Thompson