Great Expectations

Title: Great Expectations
Year: 1946
Director: David Lean
Writers: Anthony Havelock-Allan, David Lean, Cecil McGivern, Ronald Neame & Kay Walsh, based on the novel by Charles Dickens
Starring: John Mills, Tony Wager, Valerie Hobson, Jean Simmons, Bernard Miles, Francis L. Sullivan, Finlay Currie, Martita Hunt, Alec Guinness
Music: Walter Goehr
Distinctions: Oscars for Best Cinematography (black-and-white) and Best Art Direction/Set Decoration (black-and-white); Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay; currently #239 on IMDb's Top 250
Synopsis: a boy is made rich by an anonymous benefactor
How I saw it: on video (rented from Netflix), July 2008
Subjective Rating: 5/10 (Indifferent).
Objective Rating: 3/10 (gets points for characters, pacing and acting) c. 2.3/4 (Okay).

Perfectly good movie for what it is, but not great. Maybe I'm the only person who thinks so, but Dickens just doesn't seem to work well as movies. Typical 19th-Century speech does not play well read by actors. No one else will ever agree with me on that, will they... The music is the quintessential corny-ass romantic score.  Visually, a lot could have been done with atmosphere, but isn't. As for the story, the whole "now I'm ill and will sleep through the climax" thing kind of bugs me. Is that in the book? Come on, Dickens, you can do better than that. Or was opening the drapes supposed to be the climax?