What 1946 British film directed by David Lean adapts Charles Dickens' novel?

The 1946 British film directed by David Lean that adapts Charles Dickens’s novel is Great Expectations.

The film follows Pip, an orphan whose life changes after encounters with an escaped convict, the eccentric Miss Havisham, and her adopted daughter Estella. John Mills plays the adult Pip, while Anthony Wager plays him as a child; Valerie Hobson plays the adult Estella and Jean Simmons the younger version.

Lean’s adaptation condenses Dickens’s long novel but preserves its central themes of ambition, class, guilt, loyalty, and moral growth. Martita Hunt’s performance as Miss Havisham and Alec Guinness’s appearance as Herbert Pocket are among its memorable elements.

Great Expectations was Lean’s first major Dickens adaptation; he followed it with Oliver Twist in 1948. The film received Academy Awards for black-and-white art direction and cinematography and ranked fifth in the British Film Institute’s 1999 poll of the greatest British films.