Before Fitoor, Watch These 5 Adaptations of Great Expectations

Will Fitoor be able to match up to the other classic retellings of Great Expectations?

Great Expectations with its gothic air, crime components, comedic melodrama, satirical vein, social realist set-up, and above all, an ode to romance has made it a work of such enduring appeal that adaptations continue to pour out across the world in various forms. Indian filmmaker Abhishek Kapoor is the latest one to find inspiration in the novel that Charles Dickens himself described as “a very fine, new and grotesque idea”. It will be interesting to see how Kapoor’s Fitoor featuring Aditya Roy Kapur, Katrina Kaif and Tabu adapts itself to the world of Pip, Estella, and Miss Havisham.

Since Dickens’ work has inspired numerous adaptations, here’s an attempt to revisit five of the finest in film and TV.

An Orphan’s Tragedy (1955)

Imagine the idea of erasing the eccentric Miss Havisham, and the beautiful but cold Estella, two of the most important characters from Great Expectations! This Hong Kong adaptation does exactly that to suit its narrative to the local milieu. When the tale is in the childhood zone, it shows a flair for narrative romance, but as soon as it enters Pip’s adulthood, all is forsaken for a simple story of good and evil. Bruce Lee and Josephine Siao, the future stars, appear as part of the ensemble, and the film serves as a very curious time capsule of Chinese pop culture.

Great Expectations (2012)

Mike Newell’s adaptation is the classic case of how not to adapt a classic. It ticks all the boxes as to how obediently it looks at the familiar tropes, characters, sights and dialogues, but forgets the dramatic tension of the soapy novel. It’s well mounted, but has the dry feeling of an illustrated classic for students with shrinking characters and relationships. In this universe of flatness, Helena Bonham Carter was born to play Miss Havisham, with her outlandish sartorial and acting choices, and the campy Bride of Frankenstein presence.

Great Expectations (1998)

With Emmanuel Lubezki’s swooping camera at his disposal, Alfonso Cuarón transports the story from Victorian London to 1990s New York, and shoots it with imaginative verve. With Ethan Hawke as Pip, Gwyneth Paltrow as Estella and Anne Bancroft as Miss Havisham, the narrative begins with great promise, but makes the mistake of turning a coming-of-age tale into a romantic epic, and abandons what essentially is the real strength of Dickens’ novel. Talking about the creative ditch he fell into after 1995’s A Little Princess, Cuarón famously revealed in The Hollywood Reporter’s roundtable of directors,

And then I got a bit engaged in the machinery. I forgot that I used to do my own stuff, and I became this reader of screenplays that they were sending me. And I started forgetting that I had a voice. It started to become more about the industry. And then I did a film that was a horrible experience, Great Expectations (1998). That is a film that I should have not done. I passed it up many times, and then I ended up saying ‘yes’ for the wrong reasons.

Alfonso Cuarón, Filmmaker

Now you know why is it a picturesque mess.

Pip, South Park (2000)

Though there have been many TV adaptations including the wonderful three-part BBC television drama in 2011 in which Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham was terrific in her decaying opulence, our vote goes to the whacky take by the folks at South Park. Pip, who has been a minor character from the onset of the animated television series, gets his origin story in this retelling of the classic tale in the fourteenth episode of the fourth season. Narrated by Malcolm McDowell who calls himself simply “a British person”, it parodies the classic with its trademark peppering of foul mouthed crude humour and carries a unique look.

For most of it, it closely follows the original story, finally serving a major twist in which Miss Havisham appears as the chief villain. As Pip discovers the lonely spinster’s evil plan: robot monkeys and the Genesis device (a fictional sci-fi machine), it’s on him and his troupe to stop the apocalypse. It can’t get madder than this.

Great Expectations (1946)

Without a doubt, the definitive screen version of the story, and arguably the greatest of all the Dickens films, this stands as one of David Lean’s early achievements before he moved on to make monumental epics. Opening with the magnificent scene of the graveyard meeting between Pip and Magwitch, to the ghostly presence of Miss Havisham (strikingly played by Martita Hunt), this film skillfully keeps the macabre element alive in the social burlesque, without pronouncing it too loudly. The characters in the visual monochrome are vivid and the plot is continuously engaging, reminding us of how cinematic Dickens was in his writing. However, John Mills as the adult Pip is hard to swallow, Valerie Hobson as the grown-up Estella seems like a poor choice than Jean Simmons who played the young kitten. But this is a film that knows how to make a long-winding book into a graphic wonder of Dickensian flavour.

(The writer is a journalist and a screenwriter who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. Follow him on Twitter: @RanjibMazumder)