Die großen Erwartungen (1974)

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• Basiert auf: Große Erwartungen

Great Expectations is a 1974 film made for television based on the Charles Dickens 1861 novel of the same name. It was directed by Joseph Hardy, with screenwriter Sherman Yellen and music by Maurice Jarre, starring Michael York as Pip, Simon Gipps-Kent as Young Pip and Sarah Miles as Estella. The production, for Transcontinental Films and ITC, was made for US television and released to cinemas in the UK. It broke with tradition by having the same actress play both the younger and older Estella. The film was shot by Freddie Young. It was filmed in Eastmancolor and it was entered into the 9th Moscow International Film Festival in 1975.

Production and reception

CinemaTV Today reported in 1974, however, that "in an unprecedented move, the bulk of the score for Sir Lew Grade and NBC's musical version of Great Expectations has been scrapped seven weeks into shooting". Films Illustrated reported that the film would contain "only a traditional score by Maurice Jarre" after the idea of a film musical version had been dropped.

Critics' comments were generally negative. The Listener: "Everything is wrong about it with a sort of dedicated, inspired wrongness that, in itself, is breath-taking". The Monthly Film Bulletin thought director Hardy and screenwriter Yellen had reduced "one of Dickens' most subtle and complex novels to an insipid seasonal confection".

Brian McFarlane, writing in a 2008 study of screen adaptations of Great Expectations, criticised the film for its tendency to give way to "clichés of sentimentality" and assured the director, who had expressed a hope that people would not feel the necessity of comparing it with David Lean's version that, "he need not have worried: no one would have spoken of them in the same breath.

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