Past classics, summer rubbish.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher
• Position: Reel World

I WAS ON SABBATICAL during the spring 2002 semester, writing a monograph and catching up on reading that the school year's teaching obligations often prohibit. I revisited many old favorites --the cherished novels of Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Honore de Balzac, George Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad. I was always especially fond of Dickens, and today believe more than ever that Great Expectations is not only his supreme achievement, but one of the greatest European novels. I also went back to some of the cinema renderings of Dickens. There has been a notion that, for a literary work to be validated, it must be turned into a great movie. In this day and age, a movie adaptation will be as close as many get to literature. Given the quality of a great deal of contemporary fiction, this may be of little consequence to our culture. There was a time, however, when a sincere effort was made to translate an author's ideas into another medium. Dickens and William Shakespeare have been time-honored test cases, with various film versions of many key works of these two writers who, for many critics and audiences, have made an equal impression on the cultural imagination and literary history.

Many argue that director David Lean is the definitive Dickens interpreter, his "Great Expectations" (1946) and "Oliver Twist" (1948) capturing best the sensibility of these works, if veering a bit much into the realm of the Gothic. In fact, both are wanting on numerous counts, despite their fine casting and direction. "Great Expectations" deletes many of the book's key characters and scenes, and has a "happy ending" very much a requirement of the American and British production codes of the day, despicable here given Dickens' struggles to avoid such a conclusion, or at least to keep it ambiguous. Still, the performances and obvious commitment to the project, the sense of importance of the novel running throughout the film, makes it almost possible to ignore such shortcomings.

There have been a number of other adaptations of the book, including a three-and-a-half-hour version produced by Disney in 1989, which contains far more of the book's details, but far less of its atmosphere. Then there is the 1997 film with Robert De Niro and Gwyneth Paltrow. This adaptation of Dickens' greatest novel tells us a great deal about the trajectory of the commercial entertainment industry. For the life of me, I can't see why this version of "Great Expectations" exists. It...