David Hast: Scott, have you seen Great Expectations?
Scott Vander Werf: I've seen several versions of Great Expectations, the greatest of which, of course, is the David Lean one from 1946.
DH: Yeah, it was the first of two features that David Lean did early in his career that were adaptations of Charles Dickens' novels.
SVW: And they're really, they sort of embody Dickens, Dickensian cinema.
DH: Yeah, and even maybe to our point more, they embody British cinema. I think that if you want to see perfect examples of the British studio system, you know, that was in the 30s, 40s, 50s, which really paralleled and was similar in a lot of ways to what Hollywood was doing where most of the films were shot in studios, you couldn't do any better than these to see like classic examples of British cinema.
SVW: And if you watch both films back to back, you can kind of see that they even... utilize, especially in the scenes in Great Expectations in London, they use some of the same sort of street scenes.
DH: Yeah, although they're all done in studios. They're brilliantly done. The two films are of a piece in a way. Great Expectations was 1946 and Oliver Twist was 1948, but they had the same, you know, they're both studio films and they're both, they use the same teams besides both being directed by David Lean. They had the same producer. They had the same editor. And most importantly, they showcase the brilliant black and white cinematography of Guy Green.
SVW: And they also both at least begin, well, actually, with Oliver Twist throughout but they focus in on the lead characters are children.
DH: Yeah. Well, as often is true in Dickens. So there's a lot to be said about these movies. One thing I think that's interesting about them is that they were the first two movies that Alec Guinness is in. And David Lean really liked Alec Guinness, who went on to be in six of his films, including Lawrence of Arabia, and the movie that he won the Best Actor Oscar for, The Bridge on the River Kwai, also Dr. Zhivago and A Passage to India. So those four are the later films in David Lean's career. David Lean really is this kind of, I really think of him as one of the main figures in the early British cinema. The stuff that eventually led to the British comedies from Ealing starring Alec Guinness and so forth. But he's best known now we think of him for these huge scale epic kind of movies like Lawrence of Arabia
SVW: And these films the hit the early films in particular these Dickens adaptations really have they're black and white. They're amazingly filmed and the actors are incredible as well and talking about Alec Guinness, he's a young man, his own age, in Great Expectations, but then he portrays Fagin with a lot of prosthetic makeup, and he's an old man in that film.
DH: Yeah, maybe that's, we're seeing Alec Guinness early in his career getting a chance to play a character.
SVW: Now it's interesting you bring up the epic films. Those are the movies that I've never seen. I've never seen Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, or Dr. Zhivago.
DH: Well, they're all worth seeing, but you know, it's funny, because, you know, these are the movies that people remember him for these huge technicolor three hour epics and it's the movie that Lean won his Oscars for and so forth. But I find them today to be a little bit cold. I mean they're beautiful to look at but it's hard to buy into the characters fully. I recently watched The Bridge on the River Kwai and I just don't get the main Alec Guinness character. Whereas his early films are very efficient. The great film critic Roger Ebert praised the early David Lean films over those later, more splashy ones, and he said that they reflected Lean's start in filmmaking as an editor. He was first an editor, and that they have a greater economy and greater energy in their storytelling in under two hours. And interestingly, he started as an editor, David Lean, the last two movies he edited in the early 40s were 49th Parallel and One of our Aircraft is Missing which are obscure sounding films today but the important thing is that they were two of the early collaborations of Michael Powell and Emmerich Pressburger who we should do a show on later because I they have my vote for the greatest British filmmakers ever
SVW: Talking about the editing though. You can really see that in Great Expectations the way that he moves the camera and also edits each scene is edited with for dramatic effect and he'll have the camera moving in one direction and then the next shot is the camera moving in an opposite direction and he does it very subtly.
DH: Yeah and I would say they're perfect entertainments. They don't have an ounce of fat. There's no unnecessary shots or scenes in these movies. You know they both come in under two hours and what's interesting about them is they're Dickens. I mean Dickens novels range from at 400 to 800 pages long. Both Great Expectations and Oliver Twist have had miniseries and multiple season series done on them, because if you're going to really shoot the whole novel, it's going to take you 10 or 12 hours to tell the story. And yet, if you want to see a version of Dickens in an hour and forty minutes that has all the essentials and it still really captures the essence, especially emotionally, of Dickens, he does it in these features.
SVW: Now of course we're living many years after these films were made, but I'm assuming that the audiences, particularly with Great Expectations, would have at times have been scared at some of the dramatic moments. And the film is very gothic, particularly in the beginning of the film, the first movement of it. But then that comes back later towards the end of the film as well.
DH: Yes, you're talking about the opening scene of Great Expectations in the graveyard with the prisoner. It's like it's the it's the epitome of Gothic filmmaking, the black and white photography, the way that it's lit, the way that he uses trees and bushes and branches as if they're personified and scaring Pip. And then also the way that he of course the whole, the whole encounter with the convict Magwitch in the initial scene that sets up the rest of the film.
DH: Yeah, yeah. It's funny, I don't think he does anything blindingly original, you know? He's just a master of the film form. It reminds me in a weird way of like Peter Jackson who made The Lord of the Rings. Who, you can't find much, if anything, that Peter Jackson did first. You know, he wasn't doing new stuff, but he was a complete master of every aspect of filmmaking.
SVW: And to what degree was David Lean in control of everything from not just directing it, but controlling the look of the film and the editing?
DH: I mean, I don't know that for sure. I mean, I'm sure, I think he was probably pretty particular about all that and he wasn't the editor of these films, but having been an editor, he knew how to shoot for editing and I'm sure he was in the editing room. I like early David Lean because in a way he's like, this prototype for almost for the British's, the English view of themselves, right? If you're gonna tell the story of Britain in a kind of conventional way, you start with the 19th century. Of course, you're gonna, we don't start with it necessarily, but Lean does and 19th century Britain and the way Dickens portrays it is very much part of the British conception of their own history. And then he goes on and he does these other smaller films about the British during World War II and something like Hobson's Choice, which we talked about in our show about Charles Lawton, which is a wonderful comedy and really sets the stage, I think, in many ways. It's part of this whole movement of these offbeat British comedies in the 50s with Alec Guinness in a lot of them.
SVW: And yet it's still a period piece.
DH: That's true, yeah, because that one takes place in the early 20th century. So I just think he's really like... he's like the blueprint for British studio cinema, black and white, and yet ironically, he's most famous for those big color, technicolor films later on.
SVW: And after enjoying great expectations in Oliver Twist, I'm looking forward to the films he did the few years earlier than that, This Happy Breed, Blythe Spirit, and Brief Encounter.
DH: I have to admit I've only seen one of those, Brief Encounter and Brief Encounter is, it's widely regarded as this great film. I mean, you look at IMDB and it's got an eight rating or something. I strangely did not, it's about a brief sort of not accomplished affair between two people. And I find it really dated. And interestingly, I found those people not that interesting, but I found all the supporting characters really interesting, which he does so well in the Dickens films too, right?
SVW: A lot of the same actors are in both films.
DH: Yeah, and he's great at creating, with just a line or two, creating a character who's memorable.
SVW: All right, well thanks for joining us.
DH: Thank you, Scott.
