Just once in a while there arrives a motion picture that forces one to admit that Twentieth-Century society has developed a magnificent artistic medium, worthy of comparison to Elizabethan drama or Russian fiction of the last century. Perhaps symbolically for our age, its finest examples are not attributable to one man, author, script-writer, producer, director, or the actors. If any of these fail, the movie cannot be first-rate, and that is very likely the most important reason why the percentage of excellent films is so small. "Great Expectations" is a great picture. No one factor made it so. The novel by Dickens is not one of his very best, but it is rich with the crowded, humorous, hypocritical, grotesque, vigorous, and tragic life of Nineteenth-Century England. The producers of the picture have reproduced this life, giving it the sounds and scenes that were everyday to the Victorian, and have put into it characters that speak as Dickens must have intended them to speak, and look like the work of his illustrator, Cruikshank.

Like a number of Dickens' novels, "Great Expectations" is loosely constructed. It centers around the boyhood and early manhood of Pip, who has spent his early years with his sister, the wife of a blacksmith. There are two completely separate plots, which Dickens, with characteristic wantonness, connects at the end by means of pure coincidence. Condemned as lack of skill, this deus ex machina shows only that the author was more interested in character, scene, and the fate of his hero than he was in the mechanics of plot.

As a boy, Pip was kind to an escaped convict on the marshes. The convict is given his freedom in Australia, and he never forgets Pip. The other plot concerns a woman, who since her bridegroom failed at her wedding years before, has never seen the light of day. She lives in her bridal dress in a room that still contains the banquet table complete with wedding cake. Pip is summoned to talk to her once a week, and there he meets a beautiful girl, Estella, who is being trained by the old lady to revenge her on men. But Pip loves her right through his life, while she, admittedly without a heart, breaks the heart of every man who falls for her. Meanwhile, an anonymous person has given Pip money to go to London and become a gentleman, and then his adventures start in earnest.

Every character is a type and an individual, and every one is well-acted. There is Jaggers, the keen, comfortable and surprisingly soft-hearted lawyer; Pip as a boy, played with magnificent restraint, obedient, kind-hearted, and romantic; Miss Havisham, the grotesque bride of another day, who dies horribly in the great, old, rat-infested house. Practically every character is sympathetic and human, yet each holds a menace of grotesque evilness in himself, something that is brought out more clearly, yet just as subtly, in the movie as in the novel.

Stars of the picture are Valeric Hobson and John Mills, but the minor characters are not less skillful, not is anybody who made "Great Expectations," from Dickens to director.