Great Expectations

Great Expectations is a British adaptation of Charles Dickens's novel. It follows Pip, an orphan raised in humble surroundings by his older sister and her husband, the blacksmith Joe Gargery. After helping an escaped convict on the marshes as a boy, Pip is later told by the lawyer Mr. Jaggers that an unnamed benefactor intends to make him a gentleman, and he is sent to London to be educated. There he is reunited with Estella, the beautiful girl he met as a child at the home of the eccentric Miss Havisham, and with the strange household where time appears to have stopped.

David Lean directed the film, working from a screenplay he wrote with Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allan; Neame produced it. It came after Lean's In Which We Serve, Brief Encounter and Blithe Spirit, and before Oliver Twist, a second Dickens adaptation. John Mills plays the adult Pip, Valerie Hobson plays Estella, and Tony Wager and Jean Simmons play the two characters as children. Bernard Miles appears as Joe Gargery and Francis L. Sullivan as Mr. Jaggers.

The film runs 118 minutes. On IMDb it holds a critics' rating of 8.5 out of 10 from 30 reviews, while on TMDB it sits at 7.3 out of 10 from 389 votes, so professional reviewers rate it appreciably higher than the wider audience does, though both indicate a well-regarded film.