Dragonknight’s review published on Letterboxd:
Film #10 of Gustav's Recommendations
” Love her! If she favors you, love her, if she tears your heart to pieces, love her!”
Adapting from a classic and well-known novel is a difficult task but when you have a true master like David Lean on board there’s no need to worry. He takes the powerful novel of Charles Dickens and gives us a genuine and decent adaptation, one that is loyal, detailed and precise – perhaps even a little bit too loyal, detailed and precise, it has captured the tone of the book with great success and it’s exactly the kind of adaptation that will tempt you to go and open the novel and read it once again.
Great Expectations is a book which thrives on the masterful character study of Charles Dickens, he describes a somewhat pitiful character named Pip (perhaps one of the most iconic names in English literature) who is a mixture of so many paradoxical inner feelings, he starts as an under-confident young boy who first feels guilty about leaving his family and then starts to suffer from his love for Stella. From the beginning to the end of the novel he is struggling with all these feelings and for most time it is his sad and regretful tone of narration coupled with a delicate sense of humor that charms the readers.
Choosing the right actor for the role of Pip is perhaps the most important part of making an adaptation of Dickens’ novel and John Mills looks like the perfect actor to play Pip, he has the innocence, uncertainty and guilt of Pip’s character in his face – unlike the actor from last year’s three part BBC adaptation who lacked that rural purity which is an important part of Pip’s character – and is able to show all sorts of emotions from grief and regret to love and joy with his face and body language. The same can be said about other actors, Jean Simmons as Stella, Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham (although I have always imagined her younger) and Finaley Currie as Abel Magwitch are amazing and most surprisingly the film has a young and fresh Alec Guiness who gives a pretty funny performance as Pip’s shy friend Herbert.
David Lean does a great job turning a long and comprehensive novel into a 2 hour movie, almost all important characters are present, all events are covered and miraculously the film is never looks boring or rushed and I guess it can easily connect even with those who haven’t read the novel and that’s a monumental achievement for David Lean’s film that can be seen as an independent work, although it stays loyal to the source novel but it has its own originality too. Only a genius like David Lean is capable of doing such a thing.
I haven’t seen any of the other cinematic adaptations of Charles Dickens’ novel but this looks like a very solid adaptation, a film made by a magnificent and unrivaled talent like David Lean (although this is my least favorite of his works that I've seen) which is adapted from the work of a unique and matchless writer, it’s very beautifully shot and Pip’s story is dramatic – and at times even melodramatic – enough to charm any viewer, one that is filled with energy and life. A true classic.