Great Expectations (1946)

Directed by David Lean

Tomorrow is the American feast of Thanksgiving, so I think it’s fitting to take a look at the most fundamental of virtues, gratitude. Why do I say that it is fundamental? It reaches down to existence itself. We show courage in the face of difficulty or danger. We show mercy to the guilty or to the suffering. But gratitude requires no particular occasion. As soon as you say in your heart, of any fellow human being or any creature, “How good it is that you exist!”, not for this or that purpose, not in these or those circumstances, but purely and simply, you draw near to the kingdom of God. I don’t mean that as an exaggeration. And it is the easiest debt in the world to pay: it is a movement of the free heart, free in the payment of gratitude, as love is free and not compelled. And when you pay that debt, you are richer than you were before. It’s why the greatest Christian poets, those with names like Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, saw pride, the worst of vices, in its worst form of all, that of ingratitude. It is a direct attack against the heart of God, as if to say, “I would prefer not to be at all, rather than to owe thanks to anyone but myself.”

Our Film of the Week, Great Expectations (1946), gives us the working out of gratitude and ingratitude in comic form, though the comedy skates close to the edge of tragedy for the main character, Pip, and over the edge for such as Miss Havisham. Here’s something about the author of the novel, Charles Dickens, that has always staggered me. Dickens did not have a university education. He does not seem to have read the ancient Greek and Roman classics with real delight. But he has read English literature, especially Shakespeare, and somehow, without anybody at the time to show him how Elizabethan and Jacobean dramas were constructed, he writes novels whose intricacies and parallel plots and constellations of motifs all reflect upon one another just as in a play by Shakespeare; it almost makes me wish we had two separate words to describe what Dickens and, let’s say, Ernest Hemingway are doing. In Great Expectations, too, he has picked up on one of the poet’s principal dramatic themes, that of gratitude and ingratitude. Think of Lear on the stormy heath, driven mad by the ingratitude of his two eldest daughters. Think of Macbeth and his wife, plotting the death of the gentle King Duncan who has just honored Macbeth and raised him to the honor of being the new Earl of Cawdor. Think of the old servant Adam, filled with gratitude, faithfully following his young master Orlando as they flee into the Forest of Arden, pursued by Orlando’s brother Oliver who hates the boy because everyone else loves him.

Dickens writes about the matter all the time, too. Think of Ebenezer Scrooge, who has to learn once again, before he sold his soul to gaining money and losing everything else, to value the giving and receiving of gifts; and this in on the eve of the celebration of God’s greatest gift to mankind, his only-begotten Son. Think of the Murdstones, who do not appreciate the innocence of Davy’s mother Clara Copperfield, and who drive her to an early grave, and once they have done that, they turn out of doors the good and faithful servant Peggotty. Really, gratitude and ingratitude are to be found everywhere in his work: Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, Martin Chuzzlewit, Bleak House, Dombey and Son — everywhere.

Great Expectations begins with an act that inspires gratitude in a most remarkable way, though we don’t know that until many years have past. A small boy, Pip, is hanging about a graveyard in the moors on the southern coast of England — a graveyard where his mother and father are buried. Suddenly he’s accosted by an escaped convict, with chains still bound upon him. The fierce old man is hungry. He needs “wittles,” and a file. And Pip, partly from terror, and partly from real pity, manages to bring them in the night, sneaking them out of the house where his elder sister, Mrs. Gargery, rules over him and her husband Joe, a kindly blacksmith, with an iron hand. Pip is apprenticed to Joe, who is more of a childhood friend than a brother-in-law: “What larks, Pip!” says Joe, whenever he thinks about anything good to come which he and Pip might enjoy. There are no “great expectations” in Pip’s life, but it promises to be a useful and good life, nevertheless, except that he is unaccountably called to play regularly at the house of an old spinster, Miss Havisham, there to fall in love with, and to be treated coldly by, a girl named Estella, whom Miss Havisham is training up to be just like her, that is, to hate the whole race of mankind. Miss Havisham is rich. She hates her relations, who circle about her house like buzzards when her birthday comes around. To whom shall she leave her wealth?

Then Pip becomes a young fellow, just before the age of full majority, when he is told, by a London lawyer, that he is a man “of Great Expectations,” to come into a large inheritance, on condition that he not inquire about its source. Meanwhile he is given generous advances on this wealth, so as to become a fine gentleman about town. And we see Pip turn his back on that life on the moors. He is young — that’s the best excuse we can make for him.

More about the plot I will not say. David Lean is one of our most admired directors at Word and Song, and the film features several of our favorite actors. It’s the breakout film for Alec Guinness, who plays Pip’s best friend and advisor, Herbert Pocket. John Mills is Pip as a young man, and Jean Simmons is Estella as a girl. But the real scene-stealer, and as it turns out the moral center of the film, is that convict, Abel Magwitch, played by the formidable and immensely talented character actor, always with a comic touch, Finlay Currie. We’ve featured several of his films: you may remember him as the aged Balthasar in Ben-Hur, or Saint Peter in Quo Vadis?, Sir Cedric in Ivanhoe, and, in the film I’ve linked to above, as the gentle but intimidating giant in People Will Talk. And as you watch the film, keep in mind these words from the gospel, always near to Dickens’ heart: “The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.”

Click on the image above to view film on Internet Archive.

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