[3] 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".

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".

[7] 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.

McFarlane expressed some admiration however for Margaret Leighton's interpretation of the jilted Miss Havisham: "there is a potent sense of the perverse pleasure she takes in watching Estella humiliate Pip, and, during a later visit, of real cruelty in her telling him, 'You've lost her'.

[8] The critic David Parker, writing for the BFI Screenonline website, praised Joss Ackland's interpretation of Joe Gargery: "Ackland manages to create a subtle blend of individual simplicity and moral fortitude that seems to capture the essential role the village blacksmith fills in the narrative.