“Now, Pip: put the case that this legal advisor has often seen children tried at the criminal bar. Put the case that he has known them to be habitually imprisoned, whipped, neglected, cast out, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that here was one pretty little child out of the heap that could be saved. Put that last case to yourself very carefully, Pip.”

‘Great Expectations’, directed by David Lean in 1946, is a British adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel, starring John Mills, Alec Guinness and Finlay Currie as Magwitch. Mills plays Pip, an orphan who lives with his older sister and brother-in-law in the marshes. One day, in a local graveyard, he encounters an escaped convict called Magwitch. Magwitch threatens Pip into supplying him with food and a tool for breaking his shackles, but once this has been done he forges a strange relationship with the boy. Some time later, Pip inherits money from a mysterious benefactor and moves to London, where he pines for his lost love Estella, a girl who lived with her adoptive mother who has trained her to seduce and break mens’ hearts. Magwitch’s return to his life leads to surprises and tragedy. It’s a dark, noirish films that, as with Lean’s later movies, uses the landscape and natural world as the perfect counterpoint for the action. What interested me, however, was how much of this film featured cinematography and gimmicks more often seen in later horror movies. The opening scene, in which Pip meet Magwitch for the first time, is designed and constructed as a horrific moment, as tense and gothic as a Hammer movie, but far more effective and embedded in an elegant rather than richly camp film.

Would I recommend it? Yes – it’s a classic David Lean film: spectacular, witty and chilling. Currie’s performance as Magwitch stands out as he manages to mix menace and sympathetic vulnerability. Watch in a double bill with ‘Gaslight’.