Word: pipping
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Like a number of Dickens' novels, "Great Expectations" is loosely constructed. It centers around the boyhood and early manhood of Pip, who has spent his early years with his sister, the wife of a blacksmith. There are two completely separate plots, which Dickens, with characteristic wantonness, connects at the end by means of pure coincidence. Condemned as lack of skill, this deus ex machina shows only that the author was more interested in character, scene, and the fate of his hero than he was in the mechanics of plot...
...What, he wondered, was the net effect on man of such machines? Would the jittery 20th Century eventually learn to relax in a "kingdom of engines?" Ed Greenewater laughed and said, "Goddamn it, don't take it so hard, Second." The Chief grunted and went on reading Pip Magazine...
...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...
...intelligent derivation from Dickens' inspired illustrators, Cruikshank and "Phiz" (Alec Guinness as Pocket is a Cruikshank in the flesh). Besides the principal actors, all of whom are excellent, the most notable (and equally good) are Bernard Miles-another living Cruikshank-as the blacksmith, Anthony Wager as the boy Pip, O. B. Clarence as a deaf-&-daft gaffer, and 17-year-old Jean Simmons as Estella in her teens...