JLRVancouver The 1940 "Pride and Prejudice" is a good, if 'Hollywoodized' version of Jane Austin's famous novel. Greer Garson is at least 15 years too old to play Elizabeth Bennet, the film is set 30 years later than the novel (supposedly to allow use of the sumptuous gowns left over from "Gone with the Wind") and the ending has been sweetened. Never-the-less, the film remains quite enjoyable. Although not really looking the ingénue, Garson is quite good, as is Olivier, who plays the misunderstood Mr. Darcy. The rest of the cast are fine, especially Ed Quinn as Mr. Bennet. All in all, a good version of the oft-filmed romance.

Python Hyena Pride and Prejudice (1940): Dir: Robert Z. Leonard / Cast: Greer Garson, Lawrence Olivier, Mary Boland, Edna May Oliver, Maureen O'Sullivan: Overrated contrived drivel about status, class and wealth. It is one of those opposites attract romantic films where one hates the other while viewers already know what these airheads fail to realize. And listening to Greer Garson accuse Lawrence Olivier of being proud, while he counters about her being a tight ass quickly turns the film into a corny manipulative chore to sit through. Director Robert Z. Leonard does his best and he is backed by superb sets and art direction as well as appealing locations. The screenplay however jerks us around with Greer refusing to dance with Olivier and vice versa before they embrace with that final shot long kiss that is gut wretchingly predictable at best. In supporting roles there is Mary Boland who apparently wants her daughters not only to marry, but to do so in a wealthy family. She spends much of the film feeling ill and making viewers feel the same. Then there is Edna May Oliver as Lady Catherine who comes off as stuck up and arrogant. Maureen O'Sullivan plays Garson's sister and she is about as bland as the rest of the cast here. The point of the film addresses our finger-pointing methods of distinguishing a person's worth but the real oversight is the popularity of this undeserving charade. Score: 5 / 10

athena33 The atrocious costumes alone are enough to make me want to take a flamethrower to the screen. They are hideous! And they are not Recency era costumes.More importantly, Lizzy, played by Greer Garson, is a walking disaster. First of all, she is too old for the part. Secondly, she couldn't act her way out of a paper bag. She comes off as having more pride than Darcy, while at the same time, looking like an idiot.The story is not true to Austen either, and while I am not an Austen purist, I think the liberties they took perverted the whole meaning of the story. Darcy seemed to love Lizzy almost from the start, and the only time we see his "pride" is during his proposal. There are lots of other differences too, which are not so important.Overall, I think this film was an insult to the wit and intelligence of Jane Austen.

keith-moyes-656-481491 The 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice is what I think of as a typical MGM movie of the Golden Age. Of course, MGM made many other types of picture, but they were particularly associated with this kind of 'prestige' movie. It is a big, expensive production, based on a world famous book, written by an eminent literary figure (Aldous Huxley), with lavish sets and sumptuous costumes, starring their most prestigious English actors. In other words: portentous, showy and completely empty.This movie is all packaging and no content.It goes without saying that it is a travesty of the book, but it is hopeless even as a simple exercise in story-telling. It would be easy to deplore it for its technical incompetence, its wild historical inaccuracy and its somewhat trashy notion of elegance and sophistication, but I suspect that would be missing the point.In 1939, when this movie was being planned, America was still mired in the Great Depression and there were millions of women who had been struggling to make ends meet for the best part of a decade. What they wanted from MGM was to be transported out of the grim reality of their own lives into a fantasy world of opulence and ease; of glamour, luxury and elegance. That is what movies like Pride and Prejudice were designed to do. I can complain that the plot is, at best, perfunctory, but who cared? The story was almost incidental to its core audience. It was the over-the-top costumes, the soaring sets, the glittering chandeliers and the gleaming carriages that the audience really wanted to see.The packaging was the point!For example, the costumes are absurd – they are not only wrong for that period, they are probably wrong for any period. However, I am sure the MGM costume department could have designed gowns that were authentic down to the last button, if that was what MGM had wanted – but they didn't. And who am I to say that they were wrong? MGM was the only Hollywood studio that went right through the Great Depression without ever making a loss. They must have been doing something right.When I view this movie today, I know I must try to understand why it was made the way it was. This vision of Regency England may have been very naïve and very fanciful, but there is no reason to suppose that the people that made the movie were naïve: or even that the people in the audience were. I know I have to put myself into the position of that audience if I am to enjoy it in the way that was originally intended, but I cannot do that. I have to judge the movie on the basis of how it looks today, in the context of other movies of the era, not how it might have looked then.From that perspective, it has not lasted well. Nor, I suspect, have MGM movies as a whole. From the very beginning of the Thirties, Hollywood churned out scores and scores and scores of movies that are still highly watchable today. You don't have to be a movie buff or film historian to enjoy Universal horror films, Warner Brothers gangster movies, RKO musicals, Disney animations or the Westerns, 'screwball' comedies, romances, melodramas, thrillers, historical pictures and other movies that flooded out of Hollywood at that time. Until the last twenty years or so they were part of everyone's film education.MGM was the biggest and most successful studio of the Thirties, but my gut feel is that fewer of their movies have stood the test of time than those of most of their competitors. Too many look like Pride and Prejudice: frothy, over-stuffed, over-egged but ultimately unsatisfying: timely but not timeless.This movie is of undoubted historical interest as a representative artifact of Hollywood at a particular time in its history, but from any other perspective it is utterly negligible.