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Three film adaptations of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations

There are many film adaptations of Dickens' Great Expectations. The most famous one of them is David Lean's black-and-white movie, which was made in 1946. This classical movie of Lean's succeeds in representing the dark atmosphere of the original novel, but it concentrates so much on Pip and Estella and Magwitch that it fails to make the audience experience the rich aspects of Dickensian world. Dean's movie has had a lot of influence on the later adaptations of this novel, and Joseph Hardy's 1974 color movie is a distinct example. Hardy's movie, however, does not show very much achievement beyond Lean's--except for the Pumblechook part--in terms of creativity as well as faithfulness in its representation of the original text. But the most recent adaptation, made by Julian Jarrold in 1999, deserves a high praise because of its creative efforts to revitalize the fictional world of Dickens's. With the good casting and its modern cinematography and creative adaptation, this movie catches the rich vision of the classical story successfully. In an English Novel class, these movie adaptations can be very helpful to appreciating the original text if they are used in proper ways.