Word: havisham
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Every character is a type and an individual, and every one is well-acted. There is Jaggers, the keen, comfortable and surprisingly soft-hearted lawyer; Pip as a boy, played with magnificent restraint, obedient, kind-hearted, and romantic; Miss Havisham, the grotesque bride of another day, who dies horribly in the great, old, rat-infested house. Practically every character is sympathetic and human, yet each holds a menace of grotesque evilness in himself, something that is brought out more clearly, yet just as subtly, in the movie as in the novel...
...Shakespeare's. Yet both characters and story were plainly hard to bring to full life on the screen. The story is about young Pip (John Mills), a blacksmith's apprentice, who in childhood befriends an escaped convict, Magwitch (Finlay Currie), and a rich, decaying recluse, Miss Havisham (Martita Hunt).When Pip is still a very young man, he is snatched from poverty into Great Expectations. Miss Havisham's subtle attorney Jaggers (F. L. Sullivan) holds a fortune in trust for him, the gift of an anonymous benefactor. Pip sets out for London to learn...
...opening scenes, haunted with grimly exaggerated sounds of wind, in the desolate mid-marsh graveyard where Pip first meets the convict, are an achievement in romantic terror; the vast, dark,dust-ridden rooms in which Miss Havisham holds court in her rotting wedding dress are presented with the same belief-compelling recklessness...
Whenever it seems natural, Dickens' weird characters are lighted up with contemporary understanding: Pip's furiously cruel sister, for instance, becomes entirely plausible as a rampant neurotic. But the good old larger-than-life characters-Jaggers, Miss Havisham, and the glittering, cruel Estella-are presented with such a grandly bland air that they become believable, and unforgettable, by the force of their own peculiarity. The whole movie is a triumphant example of what can be achieved in film by tact, taste, and keen literary intelligence...