10 Essential Movies Guillermo Del Toro Demands You See

7. Great Expectations

As Guillermo del Toro acknowledges in his selection of favourite movies for the Criterion Collection, "most people remember David Lean for his big-scale epics, like Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, or The Bridge on the River Kwai." But his biggest recommendation is for an early masterwork. Lean's 1946 adaptation of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations shares a great deal in common with Cocteau's Beauty And The Beast (they were coincidentally made in the same year), taking place largely in the confined space of a vast mansion where archetypal characters emerge from the shadows and into the candlelight. Along with Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, Great Expectations played a key role as a point of reference for the vast, crumbling Allerdale Hall of Crimson Peak - another in a long line of movie mansions occupied by the living and the dead like a latterday House of Usher. Also recommended: Oliver Twist