Original subtitles

'My father's family name being Pirrip

and my Christian name Philip,

my infant tongue could make of both names

nothing longer or more explicit than... Pip.

So, I called myself Pip,

and came to be called Pip.'

There has never been a more perfect marriage of director and material

than David Lean's 1946 adaptation of Great Expectations.

Indeed, he was often called a visual novelist.

Published in 1861, Charles Dickens' novel tells the story of Pip,

whose humble expectations are transformed

by his encounter with escaped convict Magwitch

and the bitter, jilted Miss Havisham.

Would you agree that Great Expectations

is the perfect marriage of director and source material?

I think so. And I think it's critical

that it comes at this point in David Lean's career.

Both Dickens and David Lean

are exploring, I guess, aspects of the British story.

I mean, they... throughout their careers both have looked at class,

they've looked at money, and they've looked at

the interior of the human experience.

So it's what do people think, feel,

and what are the blockages that are both social and internal?

And Dickens is able to do that as a novelist

through the interior monologue.

What Lean is doing increasingly across the course of his career

and at this point with Great Expectations

probably for the first time really fusing it,

is he's able to tell the interior monologue of a character

through the way he shoots them, with visuals, with representations,

with symbols and with leitmotifs, to where he finally hits that point

where he's discovering and uncovering character.

Keep still, you little devil,

or I'll cut your throat. No, sir, no!

Tell us your name. Quick!

Pip. Pip, sir.

Great Expectations directed by David Lean

marks the first time that Lean would adapt source material from Dickens.

And while Dickens novels had been adapted for the screen before,

Lean brings something truly special to this adaptation.

And a lot of it is around the fact that Lean was a visual storyteller.

And he brings such atmosphere and such thoughtfulness

to the historical accuracy that it brings Dickens to life, I think,

for an entirely new generation.

David Lean's film version of Dickens' Great Expectations,

that he made in 1946, is a very good example

of two perfect storytellers collaborating.

Lean hadn't read any Dickens

before he was introduced to Great Expectations

by a stage adaptation.

And when he saw that, he realised that there was something about it

that he fully engaged with.

Being a storyteller himself, albeit a visual one, a cinematic one,

I think that he felt a kind of... relationship with Dickens.

Let's talk a bit about the original novel,

because even among Dickens' great array of novels

it's considered one of his best. Why is that?

I think one of the things about Great Expectations

is the story is... beautifully timeless.

It's about... well, so many things,

but you could boil it down, as David Lean did, to two big themes.

There's the sort of futility of it and the eternity of love.

You make the incorrect decision in love and you can't pull out of it.

That's one doom. The other futility is trying to change your class.

In British society, you're not really allowed to move up a class.

That doesn't really happen. You know,

the entire motif of British sitcoms is you cannot move up in a class.

So these two are the strongest themes of the... the novel.

There are lots of other things he explores, things like poverty,

the trap of poverty, betrayal, all sorts of other elements,

but those, I think, are the strongest parts of the story.

Although many people love Dickens' A Tale Of Two Cities,

which preceded Great Expectations,

or they might love A Christmas Carol,

the thing that's really special about Great Expectations

is it combines and influences so many other genres of novel to come.

It's a morality tale. It's the story of a man's coming of age

from boy to man. It's a story of rags to riches to rags again.

Great Expectations is relatively late in Dickens canon,

but it is clearly one of the most popular books that he ever wrote.

Perhaps only slightly less popular than A Christmas Carol.

I think the reason for its popularity,

and it has been adapted for stage, screen,

and television countless times,

is because it does so many different things in one.

On the one hand, it is a melodrama about a young man

seeking his identity, an orphan who wants to find his true self.

At the same time is a critique of Victorian society

and the aspirations thereof.

There is a thriller element to it

and there is also a comic element too.

It's a book that's designed to be read aloud.

So Dickens would do readings of his work for money.

He was always desperately broke,

it was an important income source for him. But other people

would do this later in pubs and bars because literacy was not universal.

And when you look at the book from that perspective,

it is this... almost comedic role of jokes,

of comments, of sideswipes.

It is almost like a stand-up routine when spoken.

And when put on the page, it has a lightness to it.

When it explores these very dark and very complex themes,

it does so with such a joyous lightness of touch.

Great Expectations, like most of Dickens' work,

was also released and published as a serial piece of work,

which means that it has this episodic quality

throughout its main character Pip's life.

That means that it kind of lends itself to many subplots,

to various ensemble characters

who have complex relationships with our protagonist.

And often that lends itself to melodrama as well.

And the Victorians loved and lapped up melodrama.

They loved the story of a child missing and reunited with a mother.

They loved the story of someone

who discovers their secret benefactor

was an escaped convict that they knew all along.

Dickens had an interest in childhood,

and particularly in orphans. And he showed that previously

with David Copperfield. And with this story,

he does have imperilled children,

and children who form quite meaningful relationships

early in life like Pip and Estella.

And then you watch as those relationships

develop over a number of years, really up until their old age,

but you always know that in spite of the twists and turns

and sort of theatrical things within these stories

and the surprise twists, that you will see

a narrative resolution to the stories of these characters,

even if it's not necessarily a happy one.

Lean's version is a triumph of casting.

John Mills as the spirited Pip.

Alec Guinness as loyal friend Herbert Pocket.

Finlay Currie as Magwitch.

Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham.

And Valerie Hobson as that uncaring object of Pip's affections,

the cruel Estella.

And it is a triumph of imagery.

Watching Great Expectations, it is as if the Dickensian world

is being invented before our eyes.

The breathtaking exteriors, the almost fairy-tale sets,

that indelible sense of place and time and mystery.

A supreme example of filmmaking craft,

Great Expectations is a true wonder of British cinema.

Come along, boy!

Take your hat off!

Great Expectations finds two of our leading storytellers

at the height of their powers, David Lean and Charles Dickens.

The author's 13th novel is one of his greatest achievements.

Adapted 28 times for stage and screen,

with all its secrets and devious schemes,

this is both Dickens richest and arguably darkest work.

It is Lean who added the possibly happy ending.

Great Expectations has a very complex plot,

and it involves relationships between the main characters

which are hidden until the very end.

It's the story of young orphan, Pip,

who is brought up by kindly blacksmith called Joe Gargery,

who is married to Pip's sister, who is a bit of a harridan.

And it's the search for... his own identity,

and Pip's own aspirations to become a gentleman.

These are the sort of secret aspirations he has,

because he is, in fact, you know,

living under fairly common circumstances.

And he finds himself being...

a kind of playmate to a young lady

who is the ward of Miss Havisham.

Miss Havisham is this strange woman

who lives in a large old house full of cobwebs,

who's been sitting there in her bridal gown for years

since the day she was jilted at the altar.

She has invited Pip to come in

and, basically, just be company, be a sort of companion.

At first he's completely terrified, but in the process of returning,

he falls in love with the young ward, Estella.

Estella treats him really like sort of dirt.

She says, "You are a common boy." She always calls to him, "Boy!"

And it makes him more aware of his poor background.

And it's that that triggers his quest for great expectations,

for some sort of social elevation and possibly wealth.

And they move around each other a little bit.

He's still as in love with her as ever he was,

but her job now, her mission,

is to entrap the hearts of all the young men of London

And she does so very successfully. She goes with Pip

to a lot of parties where she breaks his heart,

- she breaks everyone's heart. - It's quite interesting, though, isn't it,

certainly in the film version, - Estella always warns Pip. - Yes.

She goes, "Don't love me, because I will break your heart."Yes.

"Don't. You know what's gonna happen."

Almost as she's sort of - warning him off. - Yeah.

That's almost the very first thing she says to him when she sees him.

He says, "I remember kissing you." And she says,

"Well, do not fall in love with me,

because this is what I'm supposed to do. I'm the assassin.

Do not fall victim to me." But he can't help himself.

He can't help himself. So she chooses a man to destroy and marry.

And, of course, that breaks Pip.

And this all happens around the same time.

The escape... the Magwitch escape and Estella's marriage

all happen at the same point.

Surprisingly, Lean had not been an avid reader of Dickens.

He was taken to see a stage adaptation of Great Expectations

in 1939 starring Alec Guinness.

It was as if he was struck by lightning.

What a film this would make!

He threw himself into the author's entire works,

but it had to be Great Expectations.

So in 1939, David Lean

goes to see a stage adaptation of Great Expectations.

And this particular version had been considerably sculpted

and cut down from the novel and he found it brilliant.

It had been written and cut down by a young actor called Alec Guinness.

And so there was the seed really for the 1946 film.

It would take a little while to come to fruition,

but Lean was persuaded that a Dickens adaptation for the screen

could be his next project.

What I find always surprising

is that he wasn't really a Dickens fan beforehand,

and I believe he went to a stage production

that sort of completely changed his - mind. - Yes.

When you say he wasn't really a Dickens fan,

he didn't like reading, he didn't want to encounter anything

that was on the written page. So he was invited to attend this play,

this version of Great Expectations, he went very reluctantly,

but he was absolutely swept up in this...

It was not quite a one-person play,

but it was put together by Alec Guinness,

who played Herbert Pocket in the play and also in the film.

And it had Martita Hunt in it, who would go on to play Miss Havisham.

Yes. And he was just... caught up by this.

He thought it was just amazing. And he waited around afterwards

and decided, "Right, I'm going to make this."

He hadn't really reached the stage yet where he could quite say,

"This is what I'm going to do next. Give me the money."

And so it took a while for him... - This is 1939, isn't it? - Yes.

Seven years before he made the film. He just knew that this

was what he wanted to do. This was a project he believed passionately in.

Of course, there have been numerous Dickens adaptations.

Lean thought George Cukor's David Copperfield decent enough.

But Ealing's Nicholas Nickleby suffered too common a problem

when it came to Dickens, trying to cram it all in.

Lean simply listed all the episodes he hungered to shoot

and found a way to connect them,

passing over great swathes of the novel. Less is more.

"You have to savour Dickens," he said,

filling his chosen scenes with the majestic possibilities of cinema.

So Dickens adaptations have existed

since the beginning of cinema, really.

And one of the pioneers of moviemaking itself,

DW Griffiths in Hollywood, had done a Dickens adaptation in the 1910s

and claimed that Dickens' style of storytelling,

which jumped between various threads and through time,

inspired the invention of cross-cutting.

His works gave filmmakers

a kind of blueprint for a film, because of the characters,

the nature of 'em, and because he was a natural storyteller.

You didn't have to invent a story to actually, you know,

get that onto the screen.

So it was very important for Lean when adapting this novel

to a screenplay with his co-screenwriter Ronald Neame,

that they focus on some of the key moments that would be visual.

And Lean knew from the start that, for instance,

Pip meeting with Magwitch or Miss Havisham's fate

were these very big dramatic scenes

that he could get a lot of visual excitement out of,

that he could place the camera in interesting places.

By the time Lean had got around to thinking about Great Expectations,

of course, there had been a war.

He'd seen the play in 1939, thought about it as a possible film,

and then by the time 1945 arrived,

he and his fellow filmmakers, Ronald Neame,

Anthony Havelock-Allan, who had formed this company, Cineguild,

wanted to do something different.

They wanted to take... to do a new film

that was not connected or in any way associated with the war years.

And they thought, "Perhaps we should go back to the Victorian era.

Perhaps we should do something a little bit historic,

but within kind of memory."

And... Lean obviously thought straightaway of Great Expectations.

Studio head J Arthur Rank needed little convincing.

When producer Ronald Neame pitched it to him, he replied,

"Go away and make it."

Rank rightly saw a chance to crack the American market.

Lean gained a creative freedom he had never experienced.

Here was the chance to define his career

away from his early partnership with Noel Coward.

Let's talk a little bit about David Lean first of all.

It's 1946. How big a director was he at that stage?

Well, at that point, David Lean is a big director,

but not as big as he's going to be.

He stands on the threshold of greatness.

He's... he's had...

Some of the films are legendary.

He's made Brief Encounter, Blithe Spirit,

he's made In Which We Serve. He's building up this great reputation.

He's beginning to become noticed in America and his skill is evident.

It's this film that shoots him into a stellar level of direction.

This is the film that makes him into,

or allows him to reveal his David Leanness, if you like.

This is the film that paves the way for Lawrence Of Arabia,

when he's given the chance to work with big locations, outdoor scenes,

and use landscape to tell people's stories as well as just interiors.

So this is a critical moment in his career, but he's already...

you know, people will still go to his films in droves.

So Lean also saw an opportunity with Great Expectations

to move away from the influence of playwright

and very powerful figure Noel Coward,

who had been famous before Lean was ever famous or known,

and who was heavily involved

in the entirety of Lean's career up to that point,

even with Brief Encounter which was based on one of Coward's plays.

So he wanted to move away from that collaboration and be given

a little bit more freedom to explore the themes and visual style

that he wanted to pursue. Lean had such a strong sense

of the visual and the aesthetic, and he believed

that no matter what the source material was,

or what kind of literary adaptation he was taking on,

that it shouldn't be stodgy or stage bound,

that in fact it should have its own vernacular.

And he kind of had his own experience as well in this,

because he'd been a film editor for so long in his youth,

he'd edited up to 25 films,

including some classics like the 49th Parallel by Michael Powell.

So he had a very firm sense of visual storytelling

and how to sculpt a narrative and shift between scenes effectively.

For my mind, Lean did something extraordinary

in that he solved the problem - of Dickens' maximal fiction. - Yes.

He figured out how to do it, - didn't he? - Yes.

Firstly, he commissioned a script from a Dickens expert

who tried to essentially condense

the whole of Great Expectations into a screenplay,

which Lean said he found embarrassing to read.

You couldn't do it, it was not possible.

So he, as he had previously done on a couple of films,

went off to an inn in Cornwall with his scriptwriter, Ronald Neame,

and they... bashed it around.

And what they did is they went through the story,

they read the book, read the script, thought about it,

and then he almost closed his eyes and thought,

"What is it that I remember

that I think makes great scenes from this book?"

And he wrote the key scenes down, just scribbled down,

"These are the scenes...

I can see how we would shoot these scenes."

What I love is that he almost confesses his trick at the beginning.

The very opening shot, the voiceover from John Mills,

"My name is Pip." And you see the lines on the page.

Then the wind picks up the book and breezes along all the pages.

And that's what Lean is telling us. "You're not going to get it all."

I hadn't thought of that. That's... Yeah, that's very good.

Yes. That's really good. I love that.

He's... Yeah, he's exposing his art straightaway.

Pip's central journey encompasses both a pivotal Kent Estuary childhood

and a London coming of age.

As the young yokel Pip, Anthony Wager has a wide-eyed innocence.

This slight figure silhouetted against the vast sky,

that Lean speciality.

John Mills' mature Pip still has growing to do,

from spendthrift dandy to the realisation that his story

has been shaped by the past in both good and bad ways.

After you, miss.

Don't be silly. I'm not going in.

Come in.

Who is it?

- Pip, ma'am. - Pip?

Mr Pumblechook's boy. Come to play.

Come nearer.

Let me look at you.

The first vision of Estella had to be unforgettable.

This beautiful young girl brought up to be loved, but not to love.

The extraordinary 17-year-old Jean Simmons

seemed so much older than Wager's bewildered Pip,

who she scorns as, "Boy!"

As her older counterpart, Valerie Hobson recalled an unhappy shoot,

but Lean wanted her unhappiness

and just a flicker of resentment at her fate.

There was just a hint, a crack in the veneer,

revealing the heart beneath.

So Jean Simmons came from J Arthur Rank's sort of school of starlets

and was very well trained and groomed to be a star,

but she also had a whole other career during the war

where she'd been a singer and she'd recited poetry.

So she had quite an interesting background for such a young woman.

And what she brings to the role of sort of ice queen Estella

is this sense of almost wisdom beyond her years,

or an awareness beyond her years,

because she has to live with Miss Havisham,

this adoptive mother figure who's so morbid and... and oppressive.

And so Simmons brings something kind of haunted to the role

in spite of her aloofness.

The entire film really is driven by Estella.

She's just an extraordinary character.

But more than that, in the way that Lean casts it,

both with Jean Simmons as the incredible younger version,

and then Valerie Hobson, he really brings...

and they really bring the whole concept of Estella to life.

I mean, I do slightly pity Valerie Hobson

in that she has to pick up from where Jean Simmons left off,

because Jean Simmons is astonishing as the young Estella

She is... This is an incredible actress

at the beginning of her career,

and this is the role that makes her career.

You know, she's played this... The Rank school of charm,

she's about to enter that world, but this is an absolute scorcher!

And she, in a way, interprets and delivers Estella

in a critical way slightly more convincingly.

I mean, poor old Valerie Hobson

is not given as much material for Estella as Jean Simmons is,

so she's set up perfectly by this young actress

who was 17 years old at the time and is able to pull together

all of these... this taunting arrogance,

then suddenly changing her mind and allowing Pip to kiss her.

This child who's on the verge of becoming

the cold, dead woman she's supposed to be.

The young versions of Pip and Estella,

Pip played by Anthony Wager and Estella played by Jean Simmons,

are absolutely perfect.

They seem to occupy their own... reality.

Wager has all the right qualities of being a sort of a young boy,

a young rural boy. You know, he's... got sort of common elements to him,

but he's got a big heart.

He's got a sort of suitability to be terrified.

And yet there's a spirit within him

that makes him do what he's supposed to do.

I love his performance. Of course, once you see Jean Simmons,

she comes on as the frankly young diva, Estella,

who is a real snob. Not only do you see that she is... beautiful,

she is insulting,

she is... really a sort of adjunct to Miss Havisham,

who is using her as a cat's paw.

For Dickens flamboyant characters,

Lean knew you must cast outsized characters to play them.

Bernard Miles as kindly, uneducated blacksmith Joe, for instance,

or a boyish Alec Guinness as the dotty but faithful Herbert Pocket.

Demobbed that very morning,

he was still in uniform when he did the screen test.

Voluminous in every way,

Francis L Sullivan is perfect as Mr Jaggers,

the lawyer who speaks only in baffling legalese.

And what's so crucial, once you understand that,

is that casting is vital when it comes to Dickens.

I think Lean really grasps this, that if you cast correctly,

almost half your work is done, because they embody

the greatness of these characters.

But in the case of the two leads, there's the added issue

of you have a young version and an older version.

So with Pip, we have Anthony Wager as the boy,

and we have John Mills, of course, as the young man.

Well, the... I mean... it's beautiful casting

and in one way... quite unusual casting.

I mean, Anthony Wager is a working-class boy, son of a plumber,

and therefore inhabits the idea of this kid from a smithy perfectly.

Then as an adult, John Mills

brings a quality to Pip which is interesting,

in that some people say he's too old for the role,

but I think what John Mills brings is... if you like,

the pain of being Pip, he brings a certain haunted look to Pip,

which I think is entirely appropriate

for the experiences of Pip's life. Pip has had his parents die,

he's had his sister die, he's had to live with his sister's husband,

who's a blacksmith, and he's had to work in a forge for years.

He's had his heart broken and he comes to London suddenly with money.

And this is a person who's been buffeted by fate,

back and forth, back and forth.

And there's something about John Mills which conveys that,

he looks sometimes half lost... at the experience of life.

And he is technically measurably a little older than the character,

but I don't think that matters because that's the lived experience

- of Pip in his face. - And there's always that sense, isn't there,

that he's another one of those characters

that embodies Dickens' own experiences, that he was a child

who was thrown out onto his own devices

and had to figure life out and was buffeted by fortune.

I think Pip is another version - of the author. - Yes.

And sort of arrives at money as Dickens did,

and then loses all the money as Dickens did. He really is

very much the Dickens, you know, he's very much the character

who represents a real version of Dickens in the book.

Full justice is done to two of Dickens' most formidable eccentrics.

Finley Currie's Magwitch, the escaped convict hiding in the graveyard,

manages to be both deeply sinister and yet sympathetic.

Lean recalled leaving Martita Hunt to her own devices

as cunning, heartbroken Miss Havisham,

a mystery to both director and the audience.

Both are Dickensian ghosts in a sense,

haunting the expectations of Pip and Estella.

The wonderful opening scene of Great Expectations,

arguably one of the best openings of any film,

sees a young Pip visiting his parents' grave on Christmas Eve.

It's a windy... wintry day.

It is a masterclass in editing, in tension, in shock.

And that unusual cut must have given audiences

such a huge start back in 1946 and is still startling now.

Martita Hunt, of course, when you think of Miss Havisham,

even amongst all the subsequent versions,

the first person that comes to mind is Miss Havisham

in her rotting bridal gown

and that wonderfully sort of slightly drawn out voice,

which is a... sort of like...

kind of slightly madder, more eccentric Edith Evans.

You know, "Come here, boy."

She sends shivers down your spine, quite rightly,

which is what she's supposed to do.

So she's one of the great eccentrics as well.

I think Lean said he knew very little about what she was going to do,

- - he just left her to it. - Yeah. - In a sense, he discovered Miss Havisham

- with everybody else. - Well, because she played Miss Havisham on stage

night after night after night,

she knew that character better than the director did.

Again, she was someone who thought David Lean didn't direct her enough,

but I think that one of the skills David Lean had was saying,

"Well, she's got it. That's great.

We don't need her to do anything other than what she's doing.

I have no notes, so keep going."

Lean had the film in his head from the moment he read the book.

Escaping the poised, contemporary lives of his previous films,

he saw something both highly stylised and savagely real.

Expansive estuary skylines filmed in Rochester

are mixed with German expressionist sets built at Denham Studios.

Wide angles give way to a deep focus

inspired by Casablanca and Citizen Kane.

So one of the most memorable scenes and visuals in Great Expectations

is that of the sort of frozen, deserted wedding banquet

where Miss Havisham has been left by her bridegroom,

the thing which will have the knock on effect on the rest of her life,

the reason that she is the way she is and the reason

that she is vengeful and vindictive towards all men as a result.

It's interesting that Dickens whilst writing the novel

was going through sort of separating from a 23-year marriage,

and Lean had had his own marital strife as well,

so there's something interesting in the depiction of this character

and, I guess, really, ultimately the comeuppance

that she gets in the film.

Now we should mention Alec Guinness,

because he was in the play that had stirred David Lean.

And he becomes a wonderful Herbert Pocket,

the kind of dotty best friend but very loyal friend.

I mean, he'd just been demobbed, hadn't he, on the day he was cast?

Yeah, he'd just been demobbed. And he also really had no intention

of becoming a cinema actor. He'd worked in one film

and found it a very unpleasant experience.

It had been a small part, but he really didn't like it.

He really just wanted to work in theatre.

So he took the role and at the beginning

he really struggled with what cinema...

with what film acting involved. Again, that was another trick

that David Lean played that produced a performance.

So there had to be a close up on Alec Guinness when he was laughing.

And that's a critical part of Herbert Pocket,

is that he's so cheerful and happy. - He's comic relief. - Yeah, he is.

He's enjoys, he laughs, "This is absolutely wonderful to me.

Oh, Pip, this is a wonderful thing. What an adventure we're going on."

He's really genuinely pleased at life.

And Alec Guinness found it very hard

to laugh when the camera was pointing at him,

as you can imagine. You know, "Go on, laugh now."

So what David Lean did was he said, "Switch the camera off.

" And he sat and chatted to Alec Guinness.

And Alec Guinness laughed in close up.

And then Lean said, "Right, got it." And walked off.

And Alec Guinness realised he'd been tricked,

and this was a scene where Herbert Pocket laughs.

And it worked incredibly well.

So he pulled the performance out of Guinness.

He taught him how to become a film actor whilst making the film.

And as we can see from the career that Alec Guinness then developed,

it was a phenomenal education.

He always had a special relationship - with Lean, didn't he? - Yes.

The film is intensely cinematic, a masterpiece of craft.

John Bryan's low-ceiling sets utilised forced perspective

to the point where they could only be shot from one angle,

but what an angle and what detail,

from the framed noose on Jaggers' office wall

to the twitch of candlelight

as Estella leads Pip to meet Miss Havisham.

They used smoke canisters from World War II

to create the fog on the marshes.

This is a vision as opulent

as Cruikshank's illustrations in the books.

So Lean shot on location in Rochester in Kent,

which was actually some of Dickens' real stomping grounds

back in the 19th century. And he... was really clever

in his combination of using pretty extravagant sets for some elements,

some of the historical things,

and then also bringing in real locations like the Kentish Marshes,

which are so eerie and bring so much atmosphere

to the beginning of the film for instance.

Design, camerawork and editing amplify theme and character.

Who can forget the jump cut from Pip colliding with Magwitch

to the close-up of the terrified boy,

the scream beginning four frames before his face appears.

Or the setting of Miss Havisham's desiccated tomb of a wedding day,

frozen in time to the very minute of the betrayal,

in which she sits, enacting her vengeance on all men.

When you first caused me to be brought here, Miss Havisham,

I suppose I really did come here as any other chance boy might have come,

as a kind of servant to gratify a want or a whim and to be paid for it.

Aye, Pip, you did. And that Mr Jaggers was...

Mr Jaggers had nothing to do with it.

His being my lawyer and the lawyer of your patron was a coincidence.

He holds the same relation towards numbers of people.

But when I fell into the mistake that I have so long remained in

at least you led me on. Yes...

I let you go on.

- Was that kind? - Who am I, for heaven's sake, that I should be kind!

It's a tale of so many themes, class, ambition, money,

friendship and love with all its attendant cruelties.

It is an indictment of parenthood and how we are shaped by our upbringing.

Both Pip and Estella affectively have their lives authored

by the manipulations of the vampiric Miss Havisham

and ghastly, misunderstood Magwitch.

Can they ever escape the chains of their own stories?

And, of course, when Pip is grown up

and Magwitch returns out of the nowhere really,

he's a very different character to - the one we saw before. - Yes. I mean,

one thing critically is that he's diminished,

both figuratively and literally, by David Lean by the way he's shot.

So where before he was shot with a wide lens, quite low down,

he's now shot with a very sort of...

He's made to appear smaller by the use of lenses, by the use of angles,

and Pip is made to appear to match his height.

So suddenly this terrifying figure becomes this much smaller man,

and so he's much less terrifying, he becomes much more pathetic.

But by that, I don't mean pathetic in a scornful way,

I mean, he has pathos and he's a sadder character.

He's... desperate to see the boy whose life he's changed

and to see if he's done - something good. - He's a father

seeking his son, isn't he? - Absolutely. - Yeah.

But by doing so, by... taking that one glimpse,

he destroys both of them. I mean, he destroys himself,

and he also then removes the money that Pip has

and completely destroys his expectations.

So this, "I must see what good I've done,"

then ends up wrecking everything.

Who do you want?

Mr Pip.

So the famous Dickens' illustrator Cruikshank

was known for using these quite moody, really, images in India ink

of the various characters and stories he illustrated for Dickens.

In fact, he didn't illustrate Great Expectations originally,

but he was kind of the illustrator associated to that writer.

And so Lean and his sort of crew were interested in aping that look.

And that kind of lends itself to the noir thing as well,

because these are quite shadowy images,

and you get that a lot from the characters of Magwitch,

Miss Havisham, these seedy or shady at least sinister figures

that are in Pip's life.

So David Lean was very influenced by

a very moody period of silent German films from the 1920s,

called German Expressionism, films like The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari.

And these films were known for very low-angle lighting,

which cast dramatic, theatrical,

sometimes jagged shadows across the sets.

Elements of the Gothic, a sort of darkness psychologically.

And all of that was a huge influence in the post-war cinematic landscape,

particularly with the rise of film noir.

And so Lean is also responding to these things

and to his period of time. And right at the height of film noir,

he too is looking at the German expressionists.

And how remarkable that rather than it being in some little crime film,

as with most of those sort of things that were aping that style,

this was a Victorian period drama of Dickens'. And he takes that style

and transposes it onto this unlikely material.

Released in 1946 amid post-war austerity,

audiences lapped up the chance

to escape into such all-encompassing storytelling.

It earned millions in America,

where it won Oscars for its sets and art direction.

David Lean was nominated for Best Director,

but the performances were cruelly snubbed.

It is now held up as an emblem of all that film can achieve.

Great Expectations was an enormous success when it came out.

It was a success with audiences and the critics,

many of whom claimed it to be one of the best British films ever made.

It did very, very well.

It actually, you know...

It brought honour and glory to everyone concerned,

Lean especially, of course, who was then, you know,

suddenly regarded not just as a great British filmmaker,

but as a man of international standing as a director.

Lean's reputation was built on his epics,

but this is the purest expression of his talent.

It still has that epic feel,

but combined with Dickens' intensity and vigour

the director is marvellously contained by the author.

If a fan told him that they thought

Lawrence Of Arabia was his finest film,

he would simply say, "Thank you."

If they said Great Expectations, he would say, "Quite right."

So Dickens wrote two different versions

of the end of Great Expectations

and, apparently, was himself unsure about it.

He originally wrote a version where many years later,

Pip and Estella have a chance encounter,

but it was a little bit too ambiguous for the publishers

and they insisted he write something a little bit more resolute.

And so he has them actually meet again

at the old house of Miss Havisham.

And there's still a coldness between them.

These two are probably not headed in the same direction in life.

It's definitely still quite a downbeat ending, I would say,

but there is some finality to it.

David Lean's ending is... different again.

It sees Pip and Estella reunite and meet up at Miss Havisham's house.

But it's a far more sort of, you know...

it seems to be leaning into a certain kind of friendship

that rises up between them, a certain kind of

putting the past behind them finally.

One of the most extraordinary things about Great Expectations

is it has almost set how we imagine the world of Dickens to be.

If we read the books, we think of an imagery that Lean gave us.

Yes, he frames Victorian London, he frames the sort of...

the gothic element of Dickens in a way that defines him really.

You know, in a sense, Dickensian now partly means Leansian, I suppose.

They become linked in the way they depict each other.

David Lean is really the first director

to actually make Dickens live on the screen.

Live to the point not just when you're watching it,

but that actually live in the memory years and years and years

after you've seen these films, because he understood

the impact that you could have

if you created the right kind of vision of it.

It's stylised, but not to the point of inhumanity.

He's kept the flesh and blood of the characters.

He's been faithful to Dickens in terms of the narrative

and also the moral complexity of it.

And yet he's sort of managed to edit 'em down

into sort of two-hour movies, you know, these huge books.

And so that's what I think gives them their impact.

It's impossible to think of Dickens

and specifically of Great Expectations as a story

without thinking of... Miss Havisham's wedding banquet,

or without thinking of the character of Magwitch

looking like Finlay Currie. To me the two are completely inextricable.

And I often wonder why any filmmaker would try to remake this adaptation

or try to do it, because Lean did it the best, I think.

Is this the best ever Dickens' - adaptation? - I would...

I can't think of a better. I genuinely can't think of a better,

because of the harmony between the writer and the director.

You know, we will never know what Dickens thinks of this film,

but it feels to me like it's... got the spirit there

in a way which is very, very hard to capture,

because Dickens is a joyous comedic writer.

He's funny and alive and vibrant.

And people get defeated by Dickens and they churn out stuff.

It's Lean who understands him and who brings him to the screen.

It's a moving work of art... that makes him live.

Almost, like, living together. They really are. They are...

This is... Lean and Dickens as Lennon and McCartney.

This is absolute harmony.

For all the wonderful television and film adaptations of Dickens' novels

that have followed, including Lean's version of Oliver Twist,

none can match the startling effect of Great Expectations.

The dreamlike power of the film

has shaped the way we imagine the author's world.

In every sense, this is the definitive adaptation of Dickens.

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