This was one of the key movies that helped establish David Lean's reputation as a director. It has been delighting audiences for over 65 years so its merits are too obvious to need repeating here.
Nonetheless, I don't rate it as highly as most people.
My doubts mostly concern the casting. There are truly memorable performances from Martita Hunt, Finlay Currie, Bernard Miles and Francis L Sullivan but, like many people, I have always had a problem with the relative ages of the lead actors.
The young Pip was played by 14-year-old Tony Wager. He is fine, but is having to play opposite 17 year-old Jean Simmons. This age discrepancy is all too noticeable. Why cast a teenager opposite an adolescent?
This curious decision would have made sense if the intention had been for Jean Simmons to play the adult Estella as well (with make-up and lighting this would have been perfectly feasible). However, the 20 year-old Estella is actually played by 29 year-old Valerie Hobson.
There is worse to come.
When the story jumps forward 6 years, 20 year-old Pip is now played by a 38 year-old John Mills. Similarly, Pip's contemporary, Herbert Pocket, is played by 32 year-old Alec Guinness. It might be possible for men in middle-age to get way with playing callow youths on stage, but not on film. Mills and Guinness have to use all their technique as actors to consciously play young, but the effort always shows and the movie camera is merciless in probing the deception.
Meanwhile, Joe Gargery is still being played by 39 year-old Bernard Miles. There is now only a one year age difference between stepfather and stepson.
These age problems often turn up in Dickens, because several of his novels have childhood prologues and the main action can cover many years. The most intractable of his books is probably Dombey and Son, where the main phase of the story takes Florence Dombey from 12 to 17. This is a near impossible age range for any actress to span.
However, I suspect the problems with this film were nothing to do with the story. They were probably due to the disruptive effect of the War, which cut off the supply of new young actors for five years. In 1946, most of the actors with the fame and the experience to carry a movie like Great Expectations had already established themselves way back in the Thirties.
Movie buffs, and many ordinary movie-fans, will of course be scornful that I let this question of age bother me. But it does bother me.
Great Expectations may show David Lean at the height of his powers as a director, but it takes more than a great director to make a great movie. You have to get the screenplay and the casting right as well. For me, one out of two was not quite good enough.
Oliver Twist was David Lean's great Dickens film.
PS: In the Railway Children, 19 year-old Sally Thomsett played a girl of about 12 or 13, so she might have been able to play Florence Dombey. Her problem may have been that she would have been more convincing as the adolescent Florence than as the young woman at the end of the book - despite her true age.
