Great Expectations (1946)

Some movies make doing a synopsis relatively easy, since they're based on famous people or famous works of literature. TCM did a spotlight on literary adaptations a few months back, and ran David Lean's version of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. It's going to be on again tomorrow afternoon at 2:00 PM as part of an afternoon of Lean's movies.

Pip (played by Anthony Wager as a child and John Mills as an adult) is an orphan who lives with his aunt and her husband, blacksmith Joe Gargery (Bernard Miles). While visiting his parent's grave, he's accosted by an escaping convict, Abel Magwitch (Finlay Currie). Some time later, Pip is paid by Miss Havisham (Martita Hunt) to be a play-date for her adopted daughter Estella (Jean Simmons as a child and Valerie Hobson as an adult).

Eventually Pip becomes old enough to become an apprentice. Havisham, who was stood up at the altar and hates all men as a result, sends Estella off to become a lady and treat men the way men treated Havisham. Pip has a mysterious benefactor who informs him, through solicitor Mr. Jaggers (Francis L. Sullivan), that he'll be receiving £250 a year, which is apparently a pretty nice sum back around 1830.

So Pip heads off to London where he first meets Herbert Pocket (Alec Guinness) before running into Estella again; she's making life hell for another man although she plans on hurting Pip too, given the chance. Abel Magwitch had been caught not long after first meeting Pip, and got sent to Australia, as convicts were at the time. He turned to sheep ranching and became wealthy enough to give Pip that endowment.

But, there's a lot more going on. Jaggers knows more than he's telling anybody, and there's the question of how anybody could have known that Magwitch was back in England. But everything ends up relatively well for Pip, after a lot of tribulation. This is, after all, based on a Dickens book, and there's a lot of pages for everybody.

Dickens' books may not be for everybody, since they tend towards the long -- after all, many of them were written as serializations and he needed to keep the number of installments high to make more money. But they also lend themself well to movie adaptations. David Lean did a good job with Great Expectations, at least as well as ould be expected for a 1940s British black and white movie. Everything does have a bit of a studio-bound look, and to be honest, Mills and Hobson are much too old to be playing Pip and Estella. Both were around 40 in real life playing characters in their early 20s.

But despite all of the technical flaws, they're easy enough to overlook, and Lean did well to distill Great Expectations down to its essence, not getting lost in any sub-plots. If you haven't seen it before, it's one you should definitely catch. There are, I think, some better British movies from the period, but as a literary adaptation Great Expectations is extremely accessible.