NR | 1h 58min | Drama | 1946
In the 19th century, Charles Dickens’s novel “Great Expectations” looked at misandry, the unjustified hatred of men, and the devastation it wreaks on both sexes that’s so rampant in the 21st. David Lean’s Oscar-winning film (in cinematography) celebrates Dickens’s prescription for connection, not conflict, between women and men. Lean’s slimmer coming-of-age story is one of the most prophetic of that novel’s numerous adaptations.
The coarse but compassionate boy Pip (Anthony Wager) grows up orphaned in a British village, is brought up by benevolent blacksmith Joe Gargery (Bernard Milles), alongside his wife Mrs. Gargery, Pip’s irascible older sister (Freda Jackson), and, after her death, with empathetic Miss Biddy (Eileen Erskine).
Thanks to a mysterious patron operating through the lawyer Mr. Jaggers (Francis L. Sullivan), Pip develops great expectations—first as a classy but conceited youth, amid London’s entitled aristocracy, and next as a more circumspect adult.
Magwitch (Finlay Currie) is a convict who secretly provided for Pip’s ascent into privilege, to repay the boy Pip’s kindness to him years before. Pip thinks his benefactor is Havisham. Now that he knows his benefactor, with Pocket’s (Alec Guiness as adult character) help, he plans to return Magwitch’s kindness by escorting him to safety from resentful fellow convicts. He also begs Estella (Valerie Hobson) to break from her wretched misandrist past and the now dead Havisham’s spite that lives on in her.
Role Models
Estella’s sole model of womanhood was Havisham, and it threatens to overwhelm Estella; she enjoys playing one man against another. Several positive role models nurture the best of manhood in Pip: Joe, Jaggers, Pocket, and Magwitch.Adult Pip fondly recalls their playful childhood, but Estella stays distant: “You meant nothing to me. Why should I remember? I have no heart. Perhaps that’s why I have no memory. Oh, I have a heart to be stabbed at, but you know what I mean. There’s no sympathy there, no softness, no sentiment.”
Estella cares for Pip, but as a curiosity, not as a companion.
Children sometimes abbreviate to simplify a complex world and make it fit in with their simplicity. So Pip’s “infant tongue” prefers “Pip” to his father’s name, Pirrip, or his own Christian name, Phillip. As a child, he handpicks memories to make some sense of his past. But as an adult, he draws on memories, good and bad, to shape his character, including many that he masked because they were too painful to endure as a child.
Estella calls Pip “boy” before getting around to calling him by name. That’s Havisham’s grooming—denying individuality, personhood, and capacity for change. Pip defies this. No, not all boys are the same. Not all men are the same. He respects Estella as an individual, not as a facsimile of Havisham. He has great expectations of her: Why not live up to the best of womanhood, rather than its worst?
