Producer: Hunt Stromberg. Copyright 11 July 1940 by Loew's Inc. Presented by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. U.S. release: 2 August 1940. New York opening at the Radio City Music Hall: 8 August 1940 (ran 4 weeks). Australian release: 2 January 1941. 12 reels. 10,595 feet. 117½ minutes.SYNOPSIS: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." So runs the opening paragraph of Jane Austen's novel which is then dedicated to proving the falsity of this popular notion.NOTES: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Award, Art Direction (black-and-white) — the only category in which the film was nominated. Greer Garson was cited for Best Acting (along with sixteen other players) by the National Board of Review. Declaring that it was "one of the most charming and elegant costume pictures ever made", Bosley Crowther of The New York Times ranked Pride and Prejudice as one of his "Ten Best Films of 1940".A musical remake was planned by producer Arthur Freed in 1947. Both Sally Benson and Sidney Sheldon completed scenarios, but the project never came to fruition. However, a musical version entitled "First Impressions" (which was actually the original Jane Austen title of her book) debuted on Broadway in 1959. It starred Polly Bergen as Elizabeth, Farley Granger as Darcy, and Hermione Gingold as Mrs. Bennett.COMMENT: This witty if somewhat broad comedy of late 18th century manners is hardly the type of movie one would expect from that factory of common denominator escapist entertainment — MGM. Faithful to the mood and tone as well as the plot of the book, the amusing script (much of its dialogue lifted straight from the Jane Austen novel) provides wonderful opportunities for its superb cast. Garson and Olivier are ideal in the principal roles, and it is hard to imagine the roles of Lady Catherine De Bourgh, Mr. Collins and Mr. Bennet in more perfect hands than those of Edna May Oliver, Melville Cooper and Edmund Gwenn, respectively. The rest of the players are equally skillful — no thanks to director Robert Z. Leonard whose direction is so determinedly unobtrusive and bland that when he occasionally relies on process screen and glass shot effects these devices seem clumsy and heavily artificial. The movie has been lavishly produced and costumed, with sparkling photography by Karl Freund, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award-winning sets (a deserving win despite stiff competition from a dozen other most attractively designed nominees), and a delightful music score so full of musical cues that it's no surprise that a musical remake was seriously considered.

I like all the movies that have been made for Jane Austin's "Pride and Prejudice." This one is my favorite. The humor that Greer Garson brings to it is delightful and the chemistry between her and Laurence Olivier is very evident and captivating. The mother and father roles "Mr. and Mrs. Bennet" played by Mary Boland and Edmund Gwenn are precious and very funny. Of course, the way the movie explores the depth and sometimes the shallowness of relationships and life are memorable and full of Truth. Love it!!!!

MGM's "Pride and Prejudice" must have been pretty popular cinema-going fare in the '40's. I remember seeing it eight or nine times - not bad going in those days when one didn't have access to a private film collection and had to rely solely on getting ones cinematic "fix" from whatever "dream palace" was on hand. Until the arrival of "The Third Man" it was the film I had watched the most number of times, so much so that I could quote much of the dialogue, especially lines that I believe were not even in the book. I even remember picking up a second hand Collins edition lavishly illustrated with stills of Greer Garson, Laurence Olivier and others. I could not have seen it so many times if I had not enjoyed it. A peep a few evenings back merely reconfirmed that, with very few exceptions, I tend to enjoy what pleased me in those far off years just as much now, in spite of the derision that my many purist friends sometimes shower on me. What does it matter if the costumes are early Victorian rather than Regency, the dialogue more akin to Hollywood screwball than Austen vernacular, many of the characters a good deal more quirky than those that Jane imagined, when the result is such fun. One simply has to forget the original and see this as an entirely different entertainment. I get enormous enjoyment from Mary Boland's outrageously silly Mrs Bennett and Edna May Oliver's gloriously over the top Lady Catherine. Some of the men are possibly more plausible in the Austen sense. Who could take issue with Edmund Gwenn's wisely spoken Mr Bennett. And then there is the great Olivier, who, in a performance of real authority as Darcy, for me, absolutely convinces as a man who has to face up to the eponymous faults of the book's title before gaining his Elizabeth. Greer Garson's performance is not quite in the same class but at least she is endowed with the looks and intelligence that enabled her to go on to stoically face the traumas of the Blitz (Mrs Miniver) and discover radium (Madame Curie). MGM gave its one excursion into Austen country its full production values with sumptuous ball and garden party sequences and a lush score by its in-house composer, Herbert Stothart, which must cover at least three-quarters of the film with its Wagnerian leitmotivs suggesting many of the characters. A score well worth a listen in its own right.

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.