"GREAT EXPECTATIONS"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 426, 22 August 1947, Page 5

"GREAT EXPECTATIONS"

Sir,-Great Expectations may be 2a’ good film as films go, but it is certainly not the authentic translation of the novel to the screen that so many film critics have declared it to be. For one thing it does not make complete sense even of the melodramatic story to which Dickens’s complex novel has been reduced. No satisfactory motive is given for Magwitch’s hatred of the other convict, or for his wanting to make Pip a gentleman. In the book it is much more than gratitude that makes him do what he did for Pip. Further, the film omits telling us how Pip is to live after losing his expectations. And, finally, the changed ending, in which the Havishamming Estella, untarnished by marriage to a brute and wearing the conventional film face and manner, is made to surrender so very nicely to Pip’s spectacular appeals, makes nonsense of Dickens’s Estella. [his ending carries to unbearable lengths the surrender to popula: taste begun by Dickens himself when he altered his original ending to allow Pip and Estella to come together after 11 years of work and suffering. More serious than these omissions and distortions is the smudging over, in the usual stereotyped way, of the main theme of Great Expectations, which is compounded of a bitter attack on the hypocrisy, snobbery, and toadying of Victorian middle-class life, respect for the honest working man and woman like Joe and Biddy, and indignant pity for the handicapped and hounded outcast. What the film gives us is little more than the Dickens of the melodramatic plots; it is not the liberal, tortured, generously angry Dickens who was, in Edmund Wilson’s words, "the greatest dramatic writer that the English had had since Shakespeare." Another classic | has been emasculated and turned into a

| screen "comic."

W.J.

SCOTT

(Karori)