This 1946 film from director David Lean has been widely praised as the best big-screen adaptation of Charles Dickens. In addition to a literate, mostly faithful adaptation of the tale of a young boy growing to adulthood with the help of a mysterious benefactor, the film was blessed with a strong cast, including John Mills as Pip, Jean Simmons and Valerie Hobson as Estella, Alec Guinness as Herbert Pocket, Finlay Currie as Magwitch and Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham. Thanks to Lean's scrupulous work with cinematographer Guy Green and art directors John Bryan and Wilfred Shingleton, it's one of the few Dickens adaptations to create on-screen images that live up to the descriptions in the books.

In some ways, this is the only horror film from Lean, a director known for his international epics. It features an old dark house haunted by a mysterious, threatening presence (Hunt), dread family secrets, a frightening cemetery and even a law office filled with death masks, taken from clients who were executed. All of these elements are exploited to the fullest in Green's moody black-and-white photography. Lean also made extensive use of forced perspective to heighten the mood. The church that seems to tower over the graveyard was actually only three feet tall.

Dickens's classic had been filmed three times before, including a 1934 Hollywood version starring Henry Hull as Magwitch and Jane Wyatt as Estella. Lean, however, had neither read the novel nor seen any of the film versions when his wife, actress Kay Walsh, dragged him to a stage adaptation in 1939. He immediately realized it would make a great movie. That production featured Alec Guinness as Pip's adult friend Herbert Pocket. Lean would cast him as Pocket in the film, Guinness's first screen film role. In adapting the novel, Lean and his writing team made a few alterations at the end, giving the book an ending they thought would play better with contemporary audiences in the years after World War II.

Literary critics may have complained about that, but audiences in England and the U.S. were enthralled, making the film a big hit. Great Expectations won Oscars® for Best Art Direction and Cinematography and was nominated for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay. The story would be filmed theatrically three more times, including a modernized version in 1999 starring Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow and Anne Bancroft. There also would be several television versions, but Lean's black-and-white adaptation remains, for most fans, the definitive version.