I’m hard-pressed to think of another author in the English language whose work seemed destined for “mini series” treatment than Charles Dickens. The man wrote novels in serial form. He was literally incentivized to write long. When the serialized story “Great Expectations” became a book, it was published in three volumes.

But even though I appreciated the “Little Dorritt” PBS series that PBS picked up some years back, and tried to get into the various TV incarnations of “Bleak House,” he still seems like the perfect wordy writer to boil down to feature film length adaptations. The poor reviews for the current “Great Expectations” series seem to back that up.

There have been several takes on this novel on the big screen over the years. Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow even managed a perfectly acceptable modern version filmed and set near on the Gulf Coast of Florida. But it is the third film of Dickens’ pentulimate novel, the one David Lean filmed in 1946, which endures.

DLean had only recently transitioned from editor to director, and this, his first Dickens adaptation, stands as the definitive “Expectations,” and sits happily on any list of the most beautiful films ever made in black and white.

The production design by John Bryan and Oscar-winning art direction by Wilfred Shingleton has a lovely “Hard Times” look of struggle, inequity and decay. There were hints of Dickensian England still extant, even after two World Wars, so summoning up the era in 1946 wasn’t the most difficult reach.

And Guy Green’s Oscar-winning cinematography played up the shadows, gloom, fog and fear that captivates the viewer from its opening moments, a boy (Tony Wager) stumbling into a gigantic convict (Finlay Currie) in a foggy church cemetery just before dusk.

A fine cast that included the cream of British character players — Currie, Martita Hunt, Valerie Hobson, Francis L. Sullivan, Bernard Miles, Ivor Barnard — rising star John Mills, Lean’s future muse Alec Guinness and future starlet Jean Simmons brought the iconic characters of this brooding, comical cliffhanger of a novel to life.

Lean and co-writer Ronald Neame gave the novel a decent trimming, condensing characters as they did, making one of the best cases for Dickens being the perfect writer to adapt. It’s easy to get a taste of characters and scenes that don’t need to be play out at full, exhaustive length for us to get the gist of them.

No. It only seemed Dickens was “paid by the word.”

Young Pip was in that cemetery to see the graves of his family. He is grabbed, threatened and literally shaken by the hulking Magwitch.

“Keep still, you young devil, or I’ll slit your throat!”

The child is strong-armed into fetching “wittles” for the convict, and a blacksmith’s file with which to break his shackles. Something about the boy’s compassion mixed with his fear, and his orphaned status, softens Magwitch. Even when he’s re-arrested, the convict takes pains to exonerate Pip and his simple, upbeat blacksmith caregiver Joe (Miles) as he’s hauled away, a condemned man sentenced to “transportation” to Australia.

That has barely transpired when Pip is summoned by the local gentlewoman, the bitter old Miss Havisham (Hunt), who needs a poor kid she can pay to be a playmate for her young ward, Estella (Simmons, playing the original Mean Girl).

Miss Havisham still wears the wedding dress from the day she was jilted at the altar, still keeps wedding dinner service set, the wedding cake rotting like everything else around her. She is set on avenging herself on the male of the species, and heartbreaker-Estella is to be her instrument. Not that Pip figures this out then, or on his own.

As he ages out of playmate days and becomes (Mills takes over the role) Joe’s apprentice blacksmith, Pip’s life takes its most dramatic turn. The lawyer Jaggers (Sullivan) arrives with news that Joe cannot say “No” to. Pip is to be financed and set up as a young London gentleman, a man of leisure and an endowment provided by an unknown benefactor.

He has “Great Expectations,” Joe marvels. And that doesn’t change even as he and his London roommate Herbert Pocket (Guinness) never quite manage that business of living within their means. Pip’s journeys home and visits from Joe become strained as “class snobbery” becomes a part of who Pip is.

Visits to Miss Havisham and meeting Estella (Hobson takes over this part) lead him to believe he still has a chance with her, and that the rich old crone may be financing him to that purpose.

And then Magwitch returns.

The novel’s themes make the transition to the screen intact, along with the test of Pip’s core values set against the vast class divide. Lean has Pip narrate his story, something he’d get away from as his skills and confidence as a director grew. There’s more edge and art to his 1948 version of “Oliver Twist.”

But call it the themes, the yearning to escape one’s pre-ordained future with your decency and compassion intact, or the stark majesty of the film’s black and white set pieces — the graveyard encounter, the hunt on the marshes, the climactic encounter with a sidewheel steam packet in the Thames — that always brings me back to “Great Expectations.”

If you’re a film critic or a cineaste, you inevitably find yourself a keeper a mental lists — best actresses, best films, best directors and what not on down the line.

And if you’re really into it, those lists will include something like The Most Beautiful Movies Ever Filmed in Black and White. I’ve long-kept “Great Expectations” high on that list, with “Children of Paradise,” “Letter from an Unknown Woman,” La Dolce Vita,” “The Third Man,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Manhattan,” “The Lady from Shanghai” and “The Big Sleep.”

Something about the darker Dickens works — “A Christmas Carol” included — just begs for the color to be drained from them, the characters portrayed in the starkest possible light. We imagine that world caked in coal dust, mud and poverty, and monochromatic film stock reinforces the feeling that we’re watching a close facsimile of reality.

The almost-as-dark but frothier “Nicholas Nickleby,” adapted in glorious color in 2002 with a stunning supporting cast by the just-passed screenwriter (“Emma,” “Bullets Over Broadway”) and director Douglas McGrath, stands as another tribute to the “trim Dickens to feature film length” ethos. When it was turned into a play it was a two-night affair. The movie just skates buy on warmth, good will, pathos and some very funny supporting players.

But Lean’s “Great Expectations” remains the gold standard for adapting the master, a writer of class and cruelty, morality, compassion and the human capacity for generosity who never goes out of print and whose legend grows with each new take on “David Copperfield,” “A Christmas Carol” or “Great Expectations,” even the cumbersome TV miniseries versions.

Rating: “approved”

Cast: John Mills, Finlay Currie, Alec Guinness, Francis L. Sullivan, Martita Hunt, Valerie Hobson, Tony Wager and Jean Simmons

Credits: Directed by David Lean, scripted by David Lean and Ronald Neame, based on the novel by Charles Dickens. A General Film Distributors/Universal release on Amazon, PosiTv, etc.

Running time: 1:58