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With more than 270 adaptations of his work listed on the Internet Movie Database, Charles Dickens is one of the most-adapted authors in movie history. It’s not hard to see why- unlike many literary giants whose greatness lies primarily in their style, Dickens was first and foremost a gifted storyteller, famous for telling vivid tales full of memorable characters. Even in novel form today Dickens is both compulsively readable and easily adaptable to movies and television. Many adaptations of his work have a nuts-and-bolts Masterpiece Theatre quality, while others have re-imagined the stories in a different setting. But a few Dickens adaptations- the best ones, really- have managed to honor the author while simultaneously making his work wholly cinematic.

David Lean’s version of Great Expectations fits into this final category. It’s the kind of movie that reminds us not only of what made Dickens’ work special, but also of the pleasures of a particularly well-done big-screen literary adaptation. In run-of-the-mill cinematic adaptations, the filmmakers dutifully step from one storytelling beat to the next like an actor hitting his marks, and their films feel like homework. But in Great Expectations, the novel is the starting point rather than the destination, and Lean spins the yarn as if it were his own. Where most of its counterparts are pale shadows of the works that inspired them- the Cahiers du Cinema critics of yore disparagingly referred to these films as “tradition of quality”- Lean’s Great Expectations is a great entertainment in its own right, perhaps because he understands that Dickens was himself an entertainer.

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LOUISE BROOKS (1906-1985)



It may seem odd to include an actress whose career spanned little more than a decade and whose reputation rests almost entirely on two movies on a list of the greatest leading ladies of all time. Yet in the case of Louise Brooks, no explanation should be required. A former Ziegfeld Girl, Brooks came to Hollywood at a time when the biggest female draw was “American’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford, who continued playing girlish characters well into her thirties. With her trademark black bob, pouty mouth and decidedly adult sensuality, Brooks couldn’t fit the type if she tried, and her outspoken nature and resistance to the narrow range of roles offered her led her to walk out on her Paramount contract. Effectively blackballed by the studios, she quickly fell in with German filmmaker G.W. Pabst, a collaboration that resulted in her two most famous films, Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. Thousands of miles from Hollywood, Brooks was finally able to play roles perfectly suited to her persona -- sexually-liberated, independent, and defiant. Her two films with Pabst finally brought her real big-screen stardom, and surely enough, Hollywood lured her back. Alas, the studios still didn’t know what to do with her (turning down the female lead in The Public Enemy probably didn’t help) and Brooks’ career fizzled out by the end of the 1930s. But big-screen stardom was only one chapter in Brooks’ fascinating life -- after her retirement, she worked as a ballroom-dancing teacher and a salesgirl, and for a time she was the mistress of CBS founder William Paley before becoming a call girl. But perhaps Brooks’ greatest post-fame role was as a writer and vivid raconteur of the classic era of Hollywood, whose witty memoirs of her younger days contain some of the best writing in the genre. Even in her written work, she remained defiant and unapologetic -- unmistakably, quintessentially Louise Brooks.

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Since the rise of DVD, the entertainment media has made a fuss over the declining profitability of theatrical exhibition. According to any number of articles on the subject, the increased quality of home viewing has resulted fewer people leaving the house to spend their entertainment dollar. But whether or not this is actually the case, any student of film history can tell you that this is hardly the first time Hollywood has faced this kind of crisis. After all, with the advent of television in the 1950s, Hollywood found themselves having to get creative in order to make money with their movies. In order to compete with television, the studios decided to give viewers what they couldn’t get on their televisions, and the best way to do this was to make their movies big. A number of large-format processes resulted from the period- Cinerama, VistaVision, and the like. Fox’s new format was CinemaScope, and the first film released in this process was 1953’s The Robe.

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