Great Expectations is a 1946 British drama film directed by David Lean, based on the 1861 novel by Charles Dickens and starring John Mills and Valerie Hobson.

The supporting cast included Bernard Miles, Francis L. Sullivan, Anthony Wager, Jean Simmons, Finlay Currie, Martita Hunt and Alec Guinness.

Orphan Phillip "Pip" Pirrip lives with his shrewish older sister and her kindhearted blacksmith husband, Joe Gargery.

While visiting his parents' graves alone, Pip encounters an escaped convict, Abel Magwitch, who intimidates the boy into returning the next day with blacksmith's tools to remove his chains.

Miss Havisham, a rich, eccentric spinster, arranges to have Pip come to her mansion regularly to provide her with company and to play with her adopted daughter, beautiful but cruel teenager Estella.

There Pip is reunited with Estella, who tells him that she has no heart, and confesses that, despite flirting with the wealthy but unpopular Bentley Drummle, she has absolutely no feelings for him.

Back in London, Pip receives an unexpected visitor: Magwitch, who escaped from prison again and made a fortune sheep-farming in New South Wales, Australia.

He revisits Miss Havisham's deserted house, where he finds Estella and learns that Drummle had broken off their engagement when Jaggers informed him of her parentage.

[citation needed] Dickens based Joe Gargery's house on the forge in the village of Chalk, near Gravesend, Kent – a replica was erected on St Mary's Marshes on the Isle of Grain on the Thames Estuary.

[3]: 212  Pip and Herbert Pocket arrange to meet Magwitch and help him escape at Chatham Docks where slip 8 was used for the scene as well as exterior shots of the prison hulk ships.

[citation needed] The River Medway and the adjacent St Mary's Marshes appear in scenes where Pip and his friend, Herbert Pocket, row their boat to a small inn whilst waiting for the paddle steamer to arrive.

"[3]: 224 The company was based at Rochester, and stayed for six weeks at the Royal Victoria and Bull Hotel – the Blue Boar in Dickens' novel.

The unit for the location work for the film was based on a derelict naval fort on Darnett Ness Island in the River Medway.

The script for the film was written by David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan, Cecil McGivern, Ronald Neame and Kay Walsh.

Alec Guinness admired the way Lean directed him, singling out a close-up in which he had to laugh out loud, and which he struggled to make look un-manufactured.

[3]: 207, 219 At the end of the film, a shot of Valerie Hobson staring into a mirror was taking longer than anticipated and was suspended – it was lunchtime – and returned to in the afternoon.

Gavin Lambert however, writing for the short-lived, but influential Sequence magazine, felt "that it is not so much an attempt to recreate Dickens on the screen, as a very graceful evasion of most of the issues".

[10][11] According to Kinematograph Weekly the 'biggest winner' at the box office in 1947 Britain was The Courtneys of Curzon Street, with "runners up" being The Jolson Story, Great Expectations, Odd Man Out, Frieda, Holiday Camp and Duel in the Sun.