Review of Pride and Prejudice (1940) by Frances H — 14 Oct 2018

A good cast is wasted with bad casting and a travesty of a script, with even the period setting and costumes totally wrong, as well as the plot being changed from what was perhaps the most perfect book in the history of English literature.

Having a 36 year old Greer Garson playing a 20 year old girl, with her "older" sister being a young 29 is way off kilter. Making the cousin a librarian instead of a vicar, setting the story in the 1840 or 50s instead of the Napoleonic eras just so wrong, as well.

Then making even Elizabeth Bennet a crying "watering pot" as Jane Austen would have put it. Then having Lady Catherine say that she could strip Darcy of all of his estate as guardian, when males had all of the primogeniture and a woman would never have been the guardian of a grown man's estate, which everyone knew at that time as well as this! Aldous Huxley may have written the screen play, but he did Jane Austen's novel no favors!