PAST EVENT - Great Expectations - Saturday 6th May 2023 Kelly's Snack Shack, Dungeness Beach

Screened at 8.15pm (food from 7pm)

This was an outdoor screening (seating available or bring your camping chairs and wrap up warm!

Great Expectations (1947)

Dir. David Lean

1hr 53 mins

“Pip! A young gentleman of great expectations.”

The Marshes - "dark, flat, wilderness... intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it"…

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“The greatest of all the Dickens films.

Lean brings Dickens' classic set-pieces to life as if he'd been reading over our shoulder: Pip's encounter with the convict Magwitch in the churchyard, Pip's first meeting with the mad Miss Havisham, and the ghoulish atmosphere in the law offices of Mr. Jaggers, whose walls are decorated with the death masks of clients he has lost to the gallows.

Roger Egbert

Taking on Charles Dickens’s classic novel – a mix of coming-of-age story, social satire and gothic fable – David Lean and his collaborators establish the special credentials of their own medium in the opening reel, covering the orphan Pip’s fateful meeting with convict Magwitch in a Kent churchyard with a tour de force of moving camerawork, expressionist lighting and knife-edge editing.

Plucked from the provinces by an allowance from a mystery benefactor, Pip subsequently goes up in the world, but John Mills’s mild performance as the adult hero is upstaged by vivid supporting turns from Jean Simmons as the Young Estella, Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham and – in the first of his five roles for Lean – Alec Guinness as Herbert Pocket.

The orphan and the spinster, the marshland and the metropolis: Dickens’s vivid characters and locales receive the breath of cinematic life in David Lean’s cherished adaptation.

“A large amount of its visual pleasure is derived from the superlative photography of the Medway Saltings, and a recognition of the mordant beauty of English ‘weather’.”
Richard Winnington, News Chronicle, 1946

Main Feature 8.30pm