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Dickens bildungsroman, Hitchcock treatment, "a succession of images." The opening announces the concentrated pictorialism, the churchyard by the marsh is a plane of artifice promptly invaded by the escaped convict, as massively elemental as the wind. Pip (Anthony Wager) meets Magwitch (Finlay Currie) and the boy's fearful help is not forgotten, the first departure from the provincial house to the grand mausoleum acknowledges Citizen Kane. A castle of cobwebs and "sick fancies," Miss Havisham (Martita Hunt) like Lady Britannia squashed, four years later Wilder has Sunset Blvd. Estella (Jean Simmons) twirling the keys of the gate is an exquisite portrait of the cruelty of beauty, plus "a particular reason for wanting to be a gentleman." Time passes and the blacksmith's apprentice (John Mills) gets a secret benefactor, in London he bunks with laddish Herbert Pocket (Alec Guinness), whom he once socked in the nose in a friendly childhood bout. Raised to "wreck revenge on all the male sex," the grown-up Estella (Valerie Hobson) remains elegantly untouchable. "Moths and all sorts of ugly creatures hover about a candle. Can the candle help it?" The illustrator's art, not Phiz but Hogarth for David Lean's engravings. Up-angles of death masks give the bizarrerie of the law office, and that's before Jaggers (Francis L. Sullivan) leans forward and bulges the screen à la Sydney Greenstreet. Camera placement makes pictures and emotions unsettle them, thus Miss Havisham's dress catches fire (recalled by Bergman in Fanny and Alexander) and, as Pip yanks on the tablecloth, a rapid panning shot becomes the ferocity of the moment. "Out into the sunlight," a snob's education. "What a game 'un my boy's turned out to be, eh?" Ray in his Apu Trilogy is a great student. Cinematography by Guy Green. With Bernard Miles, Freda Jackson, Ivor Barnard, Torin Thatcher, Eileen Erskine, and O.B. Clarence. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |