Summary
Fog-slicked marshes outside Copenhagen double for Dickens’s Kentish swamps, where a runaway convict’s iron grip on young Pip’s throat becomes the first link in a chain forged from tar-black guilt and candle-gold ambition. Laurids Skands compresses the epic sprawl of Great Expectations into a fever-dream of flickering gaslight, letting the camera loiter on cracked leather boots, tarnished wedding-rings, and the sudden hush before a ballroom waltz. Alfred Meyer’s Pip ages by degrees: chimney-boy wonder, then callous dandy in velvet spats, finally a man hollowed by the discovery that his patron is not the jilted Havisham but the very felon he once fed at the risk of his own neck. Ellen Rovsing’s Estella glides through drawing-rooms like a scalpel—every smile a nick, every refusal a scar—while Marie Dinesen’s Miss Havisham drifts amid rotting lace, her wedding-cake tableaux petrified into a still-life of erotic archaeology. The film’s palette is winter bile and candle-end sepia; its intertitles, calligraphed in Danish Fraktur, hiss with Lutheran dread. Yet when Magwitch confesses on the riverbank, the lens tilts skyward: grey clouds part, a shaft of cold sun spears the reeds, and for one breath the moral ledger blurs. Nordisk’s 1922 production design recreates 1860s Thames as a Nordic twilight—coastal piers, herring-oil lamps, herringbone coats—where fortunes rise and sink like herring barrels hoisted onto ice-slick decks. The final shot: Pip kneels at Joe’s forge, sparks blooming like orange poppies against the anvil, while Estella’s distant carriage dissolves into the fog, its wheels silent as forgiven debts.
Synopsis
Adaptation of Great Expectations, one of four Dickens films made at Nordisk in Denmark between 1921 and 1924.
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