Great Expectations (1946) on Netflix
Orphan Pip lives with his older sister and her husband, Joe Gargery. An escaped convict frightens him into fetching tools, and Miss Havisham calls him to her mansion to meet Estella.
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Plot summary
Orphan Phillip Pirrip, known as Pip, grows up in the household of his older sister and her husband, Joe Gargery, a blacksmith. Alone at his parents' graves, Pip meets an escaped convict, Abel Magwitch, who frightens him into returning the next day with tools from the forge and food. Miss Havisham, a rich, eccentric spinster, then has Pip come to her mansion regularly for company, and to meet Estella, her adopted daughter, who mocks his coarse manners. Pip falls in love with her at first sight. The visits end when he turns fourteen and starts his apprenticeship as a blacksmith, and Estella leaves for France. Six years on, a lawyer named Mr. Jaggers tells Pip that a mysterious benefactor intends to make him a gentleman, and Pip assumes it is Miss Havisham.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Great Expectations (1946)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
The shot of Valerie Hobson staring into a mirror was suspended for lunch, and a worker on the film drew a Chad on the wall; it stayed there, and a cinema-goer spotted it reflected in the mirror three months after the film opened, behind John Mills' shoulder in the final scene.- David Lean asked Clemence Dane to write the script, but called what she produced so awful and hideously embarrassing that he and Ronald Neame wrote their own versions instead.
- Alec Guinness struggled with a close-up in which he had to laugh out loud and look un-manufactured, so David Lean told him to forget it, sat beside him, signaled the camera to roll mid-conversation, made him laugh and then called "Cut".
- For the escape scenes the production brought the Empress, a nineteenth-century paddle steamer owned by Cosens & Co of Weymouth, down to the River Medway, where new masts with square rigging and dummy sails, a lengthened funnel and enlarged paddle-boxes made her look exactly right.
- Dickens based Miss Havisham's decaying mansion, Satis House, on Restoration House in Rochester, and the production built a reproduction of it at Denham Film Studios in Buckinghamshire.
- The film's musical score is credited to Walter Goehr, known mainly as a conductor, but significant portions of it were actually written by Kenneth Pakeman.
- Great Expectations was the first British film ever to take an Academy Award for its cinematography, no British film had won that Oscar before.
