Great Expectations (1948)

David Lean's Great Expectations is a film based on the Charles Dickens novel of the same name. The film is about a boy named Pip and follows him from childhood to early adulthood. In the film Pip's parents are dead and he lives with his sister and her husband, a blacksmith. Pip falls in love with the adopted daughter of a very wealthy woman. A mysterious benefactor arranges to transform Pip into a gentleman and he hopes to win the girl's love.

Notable actors in this film include Alec Guinness, John Mills, and Jean Simmons. Of the actors in this movie, I was most impressed with the acting of Marita Hunt who played the rich old lady (Miss Havisham).

Unlike most films based on novels, I have actually read this book (just completing it yesterday). The first half or so of the film follows the book reasonably closely omitting only a few key scenes. After that I was less impressed as quite a few scenes that were fairly important in the book seem to be completely ignored in this film. In the book Pip is nearly killed by a man but this is completely excluded from the book. The film's ending is also vastly different from that of the book. While the last chapter of the book advances the action about 10 years, the ending of this film does not move into the future and the message at the end is completely lost. I appreciate that it is difficult to fit a book that can run in excess of 600 pages into a film under 2 hours, but I think this could have been better.

Overall, this was worse than I expected. The film did win two artistic Oscars and it is probably well-deserving of those as some of the set design in this film was quite good. The film itself was generally praised as well, but I'm not sure it is all that praiseworthy given that it wasn't particularly great, and it was a generally mediocre adaptation of a very well-known book.

70.5/100
C-