Pride & Prejudice by Leonard: Reasonable

Many movies have been taken on this brilliant book by Jane Austen. The best in my opinion is the version produced by BBC (click here for review). Being a television serial, it has the advantage of time – and so is better able to do justice to the novel. I feel that Leotard managed quite a bit in 117 minutes. The trouble though was not with time, but with Hollywood.

Rarely can a Hollywood movie escape the pressures of confirming to the forumla. An attempt is made in this movie to make the movie funny (and so the characters comic), give it a feel good ending (tweaking the story and its charecters considerably), etc. As a result the depth of charecterisation in Jane Austen’s novel is lost and is replaced by caricated stereotypes. Apart from this major blemish, the movie was fun and has managed to convey quite a lot of the spirit of Jane Austen’s great novel. For a movie taken in 1940, it’s remarkably well done and the actors have done a neat job. It is a movie worth watching; I am looking forward eagerly to watching the other versions of this book on screen.

Clip from you tube