Great Expectations (1946)

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The first 40 minutes of Great Expectations is as good as anything in filmmaking. Wonderfully atmospheric, with gorgeous black and white cinematography, the movie is pitch perfect in every way.The rest of the movie is quite good, with many fine performances and scenes and an engaging story, but there are a few things that weaken it.While some of this may be that the early, rural scenes offer more opportunity for lush visuals and a sense of wild adventure, I think the greater problem is the two adult leads.The children are great. Wagner's unfailingly polite Pip has just the right feel of confusion mixed with good manners as his fate is controlled by others. Jean Simmons is amazing with her haughty disdain and mercurial disposition.Then the kids grow up into John Mills and Valerie Hobson, and things decline. The problem with both roles is you get now sense of their past. Mills has a change of fortune as an adult, but up until then he's a simple village boy, yet he speaks well at every time, lacking any sense of country habits or manners. And in spite of her remarkable upbringing, Hobson comes across as just pleasant, with none of the anger or secretiveness or resentment you would expect to peek just out of the shadows.I'm not saying the characters had to be played in exactly the way I'm describing, with more roughness to Pip and more animalism to Estelle, but *something* needed to be done in both roles to bring the characters alive. Mills and Hobson are simply uninteresting in a movie full of interesting people.That is not to say that all of the movie is not excellent. I was electrified when I saw it and promptly read the book, which is my favorite by Dickens. But with better casting this film could easily have been perfect, and I always feel a little let down at the moment Pip grows up.

"Great Expectations" is another Dickens novel adapted for the screen and directed by David Lean. I recently saw "Oliver Twist" and thought it was exceptional in all respects, and I would put "Great Expectations" in the same category. Both pictures excel especially in two areas; acting and photography, and I should also mention their faithfulness to the original story.David Lean said he wanted no other actor for Pip than John Mills, and it would seem he was right, as Mills captured the essence of Pip to the last jot. Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham was an inspired choice, but the best choice was Francis L. Sullivan as Jaggers. Sullivan elevated any film he appeared in with his bigger-than-life characterizations and his elegant speaking voice, a George Sanders sound-alike.It's all been said in many other reviews, so I just wanted to weigh in with these few comments above. With Cineguild and The Archers, British film production reached its zenith during the 40's to mid 50's, and since that time the movie industry has not been able to recapture the same standard of excellence on either side of the Atlantic, form over substance being the rule nowadays.

Charles Dickens made things hard on his cinematic adaptors. "Great Expectations" is a classic example, a flood of vital characters, imposing social themes, and startling coincidences. David Lean took it on by offering a film that works more as a revue of setpieces than unified story, but in those lights, works quite well - most of the time.When we meet Phillip Pirrip, a. k. a. "Pip," he is a boy of 13 wandering the moors near his adopted home in the English country. An escaped convict, Magwitch, makes him promise under duress to bring him file and vittles. Pip does so, his first stand against an unfair social order.In time, he finds himself a victim of that order when he falls for a proud beauty who sneers he is "a common laboring boy." Her adopted mother Miss Havisham, a wealthy hater of men since her own failed attempt at marriage, enjoys the show. Then, suddenly, things take a turn. Pip is given money, lots of it, and the news he is a man of "great expectations" courtesy of an unknown benefactor. Pip thinks he knows who she is.Two things weigh strongly in this film's favor. One is the look and feel. Cinematographer Guy Green and production designed John Bryan give every scene the look of a vintage woodcut by Dickens' illustrator-collaborator George Cruikshank. You feel watching Pip wander the moors or walk the streets of London that you aren't in the real places but inside the book itself.The other major positive is the supporting cast. Even the extras have the right look about them. Reviewers here single out, rightly, the work of Francis L. Sullivan as the officious yet decent and fair lawyer Jaggers, "deep as Australia" and nearly as wide; and Jean Simmons as young Estella, the girl Pip loves. Yet even the smaller parts dazzle, like Pip's mean sister-guardian Mrs. Joe (Freda Jackson) and John Forrest as a most amiable and ineffectual bully named Pocket who grows into the likable Alec Guinness in his first major film role.The big weaknesses, also pointed out by many reviewers here, are the two leads. Valerie Hobson is all wrong as the adult Estella, a part that cried out for the services of her "Kind Hearts And Coronets" costar Joan Greenwood, throaty voice notwithstanding. John Mills shows more skill as the adult Pip, especially in his big revelation scene with his benefactor, but he's miscast, too, a stiff toff even when playing for sympathy. His love scenes with Hobson and the somewhat overplayed Miss Havisham (Martita Hunt) are the film's Achilles heel, sucking up precious oxygen whenever they come up, all the way through to the unsatisfying obtuse finale.Lean and his four assistant screenwriters work hard to keep things tight, a blessing as it allows us to focus on the setpieces, the visuals, and the supporting players as they roll by quickly. There are mistakes, like playing Miss Havisham as a horror-movie character and a silly business in the beginning of Pip hearing accusing voices from cows and dead rabbits after robbing his family larder to feed the convict.Lean did better work on his next Dickens adaptation, "Oliver Twist," but that is because I think it is a stronger story, or at least more easily tightened and less dependent on clanging coincidences than "Great Expectations." Perhaps the many who would disagree with me on the relative merits of the two novels will find this more a classic, and favor it more.What you get here is not a finely-woven yarn but a shimmering mosaic of brilliant jewel-like clusters, not fitting well together but dazzling in their collective display. Lean, despite his detractors, did craft solid stories and not just flashy images in his film work, and there are plenty of examples of that here. Yet the whole is not as great as the majesty of its individual parts.

A humble orphan suddenly becomes a gentleman with the help of an unknown benefactor.I have read "Great Expectations" and found it to be a rather disappointing book. In contrast, this is a rather good film. The camera angles, the use of darkness, the casting... all very excellent. Being the film debut of Alec Guinness makes it valuable all by itself.There is rumor that many people felt that the adult Estella was miscast. I tend to agree. I did not care for her. Though, perhaps, that would be part of the charm. The rest of the cast -- Havisham, Jaggers, etc -- were cast perfectly. I am not sure what the deal was with Pip's large bow tie, but maybe once upon a time that style was acceptable.