It is difficult to remember a time when Jane Austen was simply a lady writer from long ago that perhaps some people studied in school. Before she was a cottage industry for adolescent girls, a sort of literary successor to the Disney Princess line. Before reading Pride and Prejudice became a rite of passage. Before Colin Firth ever emerged from a lake.
However difficult it is to imagine, it was once a reality. Which is why, when MGM adapted Pride and Prejudice to the screen in 1940, they set it in the 1830s. With the wrong dresses. A cardinal sin that most Austen fans can never forgive (although one has to admire the way that famed costume designer Adrian changed the period himself because he wanted the dresses to be more opulent. Not many costume designers could get away with that). Which seems to sum up the current popular response to the film: it has the wrong dresses, and is absolutely the worst.
Yet one must remember that it was not 2014, but 1940. Nineteen years before a musical adaptation of Pride and Prejudice opened on Broadway not as Pride and Prejudice, or even Pride and Prejudice: The Musical!, but with the title First Impressions: evidently Jane Austen's original title, but hardly the thing one would pick for brand recognition (and although I'd love to hear Farley Granger as Mr. Darcy sing his act one number, "Gentlemen Don't Fall Wildly in Love," I admit I'm most excited of all to hear Lizzie and Mrs. Bennet sing their eleven o'clock duet, "Let's Fetch the Carriage"). It ran for a little over two months.
The thing is, although it is clearly not a faithful adaptation (it is, shall we say, very condensed), I remain quite fond. The thing is, the trouble with most Austen adaptations is that they cannot possibly convey the depth of her societal insight and satire, mostly because satire is difficult enough onscreen as it is; satire primarily expressed through prose is nearly impossible. We are, I think, too far removed from the world Jane Austen wrote in to intuitively understand how their impeccably ordered society worked. While reading, one can grasp it, but while watching?
So the reason I like this adaptation is because it was an MGM movie from 1940. MGM's house style was lush. Opulent. Full of excessive production values. And as artificial as anything ever was. With MGM, you know you're not getting location shooting, you're getting sets. The biggest, plushest, richest sets money could buy. And you're not just getting costumes, you're getting wardrobes. Fashion. Gowns, in the haute couture-iest sense of the word. And the performances will be Acting, in the Grand Old Hollywood style. And while most Austen adaptations of the past twenty years opt for period accuracy and realism, this opts for the glitziest artificiality a small army of seasoned professionals with an absurd amount of barely-not-depression money and resources at their disposal could imagine.
The thing is, I think it's a great visualization of not the period, but the society Austen wrote about. You can see the artificial boundaries and limitations imposed on people. You see women gliding about in elegant yet ostentatious dresses that are so impractical and restricting that a woman can't walk across a room without brushing up against all the furniture. You see, above all, that this society has been artificially created to foster precisely the pride and prejudice inherent in the characters: to value appearance over substance and stick with truths universally acknowledged. And when Greer Garson fires off a clever one-liner, you really feel like she's getting away with something.
While this film is hardly the most faithful to the matter of the story, I can't help but think it quite faithful to the subtext of the story. And while the satirical aspect does not seem to be what a great many people love about Austen, it is, in fact, what I appreciate the most about her. So maybe it's just that this 1940 adaptation is my adaptation, because it combines the wit of Austen with the artifice of the most fabricated studio in golden age Hollywood, and I find the combination to be an unexpectedly delightful match. And I even wonder if Adrian might have been right about the dresses...
