One of the prestige movies that I had not actually seen before is MGM's 1940 adaption of the Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice. So the last time that it showed up on TCM a few months back, I made a point of recording it so that I could finally get around to watching it and doing a full-length post on it.
The first thing to note is that the movie is based on a stage adaptation of the novel and that other changes were made to the novel in part to get it to run in a reasonable amount of time and in part because the Production Code would have had problems in a few places. I haven't read the original book, so I can't judge how much the changes affect what Jane Austen was trying to achieve with her work. But from what I've read, the main basic plot is still there.
Mr. Bennet (Edmund Gwenn) is the father in a family that doesn't quite have the means or the social standing to be truly members of the British upper classes of the Regency era. Not that the family is poor, mind you; it's more that their situation is best described as modest. Worse is that Bennet and his wife (Mary Boland) produced five daughters, and this is an era when property couldn't really be bequeathed to unmarried women like the daughters. So the parents are desperate to find suitably men to marry their daughters off to, starting with eldest daughter Elizabeth (Gree Garson). Otherwise, a cousin they don't like, Collins (Melville Cooper) will inherit the house.
Meanwhile, even without having read the novel I know that it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Into the small town where the Bennets live comes Mr. Bingley, a wealthy bachelor renting one of the manor houses in the area, along with his good friend Mr. Darcy (Laurence Olivier). Mrs. Bennett immediately gets the idea of introducing her daughters to these two in the hopes that one or both of them will decide to marry a Bennet daughter.
But there are a bunch of catches along the way. One is Mr. Collins, who wants to marry Elizabeth. There's also the fact that Darcy is not really of the same social stratum as the Bennets. And then there's Lady Catherine (Edna May Oliver), who has been helping out Darcy. She's set up an allowance for Darcy, and can remove it if he marries someone she disapproves of. There are further complications involving the other sisters, one of whom is being pursued by a man named Wickham who has a bit of a past that's all kept mysterious.
It's fairly obvious, however, that Darcy and Elizabeth are going to meet and fall in love, and eventually get married at the end of the story so that audiences can have their happy ending, which was particularly important with war clouds on the horizon.
Will fans of the original novel, especially if they've seen later adaptations that are more faithful to the source material, enjoy this 1940 version? I don't know. But I can say that for people who enjoy the sort of literary adaptation that Hollywood studios made in the pre-war era, they'll probably enjoy it quite a bit. MGM, as I've said, was probably the prestige studio in Hollywood, and their production values are the kind that work exceedingly well for a period piece like this even if it's not quite the same period as in the book. They've also got a lot of stars and character actors; Ann Rutherford and Maureen O'Sullivan play two of Elizabeth's sisters, for example.
So I'd say there's a lot worth recommending in this adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.
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