Great Expectations

Great Expectations (1946) is David Lean's adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel — watch it online on iFILM. John Mills plays the adult Pip, an orphan raised in a blacksmith's household on the Kent marshes who receives word through lawyer Mr. Jaggers that an unknown patron is funding his transformation into a gentleman. The identity of that benefactor is the engine of the plot.

The road to the answer runs through Miss Havisham (Martita Hunt), an elderly recluse still wearing her wedding dress decades after being jilted, every clock in her rotting mansion stopped at the moment her groom failed to appear. Her ward Estella (Valerie Hobson) has been raised deliberately to be beautiful and untouchable — and Pip, who first met her as a boy, cannot keep away. A young Alec Guinness appears in an early supporting role that is worth catching if you know him only from his later work.

Lean shot this as a film, not a textbook illustration: Guy Green's cinematography picked up two BAFTAs, and the production is still regarded as one of the definitive screen versions of Dickens. The question it keeps asking — whether money actually repairs a person or just redecorates the damage — lands harder than most costume dramas allow. Stream Great Expectations (1946) on iFILM.