Hacker Cinema
Great Expectations
1946 · Film · 118 min
Directed by David Lean
In this Dickens adaptation, orphan Pip discovers through lawyer Mr. Jaggers that a mysterious benefactor wishes to ensure that he becomes a gentleman. Reunited with his childhood patron, Miss Havisham, and his first love, the beautiful but emotionally cold Estella, he discovers that the elderly spinster has gone mad from having been left at the altar as a young woman, and has made her charge into a warped, unfeeling heartbreaker.
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I’ll play:
The Thin Man (1934), It Happened One Night (1934), Dodworth (1936), Fury (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), Grand Illusion (1937), You Only Live Once (1937), Wizard of Oz (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), The Great Dictator (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Philadelphia Story (1940), Rebecca (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), A Woman’s Face (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Casablanca (1943), Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Great Expectations (1946), The Big Sleep (1946), The Red Shoes (1948), A Letter to Three Wives (1949), Sunset Boulevard (1950), All About Eve (1950), A Place In The Sun (1951), High Noon (1952), Roman Holiday (1953), The Wages of Fear (1953). (I slipped two French films in.)
Almost anything by Hawks during those years. Or Hitchcock. Almost anything with Bogart. Or Grant. Or by Wilder.
Tons of noir films skirted the rules.
Look, I’m not a fan of the Hays code but some of those movies were to me better because of what they had to imply.
This is after the Hays code but as an example I recently watched the original 3:10 to Yuma and the remake. I hated the remake. What appeals to me about Elmore Leonard stories is that despite being about bad guys, they have a degree of charm to them (Out of Sight, Justified, Jackie Brown, Get Shorty,etc). The remake took all of the charm out of the original and replaced it with graphic violence and cruelty.
I distinctly remember skipping school when I was about 10 years old and stumbling across the old black and white film version of Great Expectations from the 1950s on the local PBS TV station during that day while my parents were at work.
My parents were not educated people, so that was the first time I knew there was "high art" in addition to "low art." I didn't need to have a formal humanities education or literary parents to know what the difference was exactly, it was just on a whole different level than anything else that was in popular media.
~35 years later I do have a formal humanities education, which I suppose started on that day and never really ends.
Thanks, Charles Dickens.