One Paragraph Movie Review: Great Expectations

Two hundred and second film: Great Expectations — the 1946 version. I hadn’t read or seen the story before, so I don’t know if this is a great book AND movie, or if one of them is piggy-backing off the other. Irrelevant, though — it’s great. A batty old hag and a scary old criminal dictate the destinies of Estella and Pip from childhood to adulthood, and my brain will have a posh accent for at least the next week. I feel like reading Dickens now, pretty sure he’d describe everything –gloomy graveyard, dusty Havisham mansion, sausage-fat lawyer — in ways that would round out the experience, but the film does a bloody good job of it, or a cracking good bash at it old man, if you want my brain’s opinion. There were three big surprises in the movie: I wasn’t expecting to hear a cow’s inner monologue in the opening few scenes, I wasn’t expecting to see a super-young Obi Wan in Alec Guiness’s Herbert Pocket, and I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this as much as I did. Tally ho and all that. Four comically large bow ties out of five.