I can remember resting on my elbows in front of the television in my grandparents’ drawing-room when I was still quite young, and feeling keenly the terror of the poor, timorous Pip in the first minutes of this film, who is jumped on by an escaped convict while he lays flowers on his parents’ grave. The opening scenes of David Lean’s Great Expectations still enthrall.
“You get me a file and you get me wittles or I’ll have yer heart and liver out!” growls Magwitch, the fearsome shaven-headed escapee, shaking Pip upside down until an apple tumbles out of the boy’s pocket. Magwitch picks up the apple and gnaws at it hungrily; it’s a moment of light relief which I missed as a child; then, the convict’s awful surgical threats overshadowed all else, and I was too young to sense the comic lines woven like bright threads throughout the film. I was also too young to have read the original Dickens novel, which has since become one of my all-time favourites. Parts of it are so funny they made me laugh out loud while interrailing through Europe one summer holiday; somewhat to the shock of my French/Italian/Dutch fellow passengers.
In Lean’s 1946 adaptation, it is the opening shot of the flat grey marshland, punctured by gnarled trees and the ghostly hangman’s noose, that stayed with me. Lean was here sticking close to Dickens’ original, which provides detailed set design for the filmmaker: “The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then… and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed.”
Anyway, to the trailer. It is not merely on a whim that I choose a film made over 60 years ago for this week’s recommended watch. The British Film Institute are booking now for a season of David Lean films in June and July, including so many gems: 49th Parallel, Blithe Spirit, Brief Encounter, In Which We Serve, Oliver Twist, Pygmalion, and, yes, Great Expectations.
I can imagine few cinematic pleasures greater than seeing this masterpiece on the big screen. Watch it on the 7th, 8th, 12th, 17th or 29th of June at the BFI on the Southbank. And don’t be put off by the melodrama-heavy style of the trailer below; it does not do the film justice, but then the art of film promotion was still to be perfected.
That trailer is actually incredible.