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For his next two projects, Lean switched to Victorian melodrama, and his stylish adaptations of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948) solidified his international reputation as one of England's premier directors. Both films are characterized by what might be called a 'British Expressionist' style, which features Guy Green's starkly contrasted black-and-white cinematography, John Bryan's atmospheric art direction, with its forced perspective sets, and memorable portrayals f Dickens's dramatis personae by some of England's best character actors, including Alec Guinness, John Mills, Bernard Miles, Frances L. Sullivan, Robert Newton, and Finlay Currie. Issues of social class-especially fantasies of upward mobility-permeate both works, while Oliver Twist offers a view of some of the darker aspects of the Industrial Revolution and what passed for a social welfare system during the Victorian Era.
Great Expectations is a fairly faithful adaptation of the Dickens novel-although it has a sappily romantic ending completely at odds with Dickens's more pessimistic conclusion-about the orphan 'Pip,' a young apprentice blacksmith who, thanks to a mysterious benefactor, is able to move to London and join the leisure class. Before Pip learns the true identity of his benefactor and the tale resolves itself through a typically Dickensian series of extraordinary coincidences, the film offers frightening glimpses of a criminal justice system designed to keep the lower classes in check, and shows Pip chastened by the changes in attitude accompanying his new social status ("In trying to become a gentleman," he admits, "I had succeeded in becoming a snob"). Great Expectations primarily functions as a romantic melodrama, however, foregrounding Pip’s unrequited love for the beautiful but mysterious Estella (Jean Simmons and, later, Flora Robson), Lean provides an occasional cinematic flourish-the famous shock-cut editing of the opening graveyard scene, an occasionally expressionistic soundtrack, and striking mise-en-scene for Miss Havisham’s fiery death-but for the most part Great Expectations relies on the art direction for its visual effects and Pip's voice-over narration for its story development.
Lean's film of Oliver Twist-which follows its orphan protagonist from his birth and early childhood in a parish workhouse to his escape from an unhappy apprenticeship to London, where he oscillates between the clutches of some unsavory denizens of the city's criminal underworld and the loving embrace of a kindly and wealthy old couple--is a much more liberal adaptation that even adds several scenes which do not figure in the Dickens novel. On a purely visual level, however, the film seems even more authentically Dickensian than its predecessor since John Bryan's set design, Guy Green's cinematography, and the various outsized character performances all drew their inspiration from the memorable etchings and caricatures of George Cruikshank, who illustrated the serialized publication of this and other Dickens novels.
Alec Guinness's portrayal of Fagin, whose costume and make-up were modeled perhaps too closely on Cruikshank's caricatures (which themselves drew on stereotypical features of Ashkenazic Jews so beloved of Nazi illustrators), sparked considerable controversy over allegations of anti-Semitism and led to an organized protest by Jewish organizations. The film's overall portrayal, which emphasizes the comic rather than the sinister aspects of the character and avoids any overt reference to Fagin as a Jew, seems to be based less on the original 1838 novel (with its repeated, disparaging references to Fagm as a dirty, repulsive Jew) than on Dickens's own later (1867) sanitized version.
The film's U.S. release, in a version some twelve minutes shorter, was nevertheless delayed by three years. As the complete version of the film, now available in Voyager's laserdisc makes clear, Fagin is simply one more in a gallery of broad social caricatures. As one Jewish organization which declined to join the protest explained, referring to Robert Newton's eye-popping, vein-bulging portrayal of Fagin's criminal accomplice, "An Englishman has just as much right to complain about Bill Sikes."
The Victorian era was also the social setting for Hobson's Choice (1954), Lean's adaptation of Charles Brighouse's popular play about a Lancashire boot shop owner, a widower who callously exploits his three unmarried daughters and who gets his comeuppance through the clever machinations of his eldest daughter. Charles Laughton portrays the title character as a reactionary buffoon in an often over-the-top star turn, exploiting for maximum effect his rotund physique and a panoply of comic mannerisms. Although a relatively minor Lean film, Hobson's Choice is perhaps most enjoyable-given Hobson's inflated sense of social status, his condescending references to "workmen," and the dismissal of his thirty-year-old daughter as an "old maid"-as a working-class and feminist revenge fable, with particularly delightful performances by Brenda de Banzie and John Mills. It is also notable as Lean's last studio-based film, the last in black and white, and the last he would shoot in England.
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