Given a decent script - and the one provided was far more than that - the kind of consummate actors here assembled can be relied upon to fill in the richness and comic variety of Dickens's characters. The challenge to the director is in handling the storyline of such an intricately plotted novel and in this area Lean is totally in control.

Inevitably (for the only alternative would have been a film about ten hours long) he cut the text; but having done so he did not simply film what was left: he converted it into cinema - and that's something very different. Think of the sudden appearance of Magwitch in the graveyard, of Mrs Gargery's fierce upbraiding of Joe, of the fire that destroyed Miss Havisham. In Lean's hands these are not just moving illustrations of what Dickens described; they are the visual equivalents of Dickens's words and the effects were as graphic, startling, funny and exciting as the written passages.

In other words, Great Expectations is not an adaptation - it's a superb translation of a magnificient tale with magnificient characters from one medium to another. (Note: As Herbert Pocket, Alec Guinness was making his film debut, apart from one day as an extra on the 1934 Evensong; and as Jaggers, Francis L. Sullivan reprised the role he played in the 1934 Hollywood version of Great Expectations.)