Pride and Prejudice (1940)

The first major screen Pride and Prejudice arrived from MGM in 1940, built as bright studio comedy rather than the more romantic, atmospheric treatments that followed. Its biggest liberty — turning Lady Catherine into an unlikely ally — has never been repeated by a later adaptation.

Huxley in Hollywood

The screenplay carries an unexpected name: Aldous Huxley, the Brave New World novelist, co-wrote it with Jane Murfin, working from a popular 1935 stage adaptation as much as from Austen. Huxley wrote to a friend that he was embarrassed by the money MGM paid him against “the diffuse irrelevance” of what the studio wanted — a fair self-review, and part of why the film plays as screwball comedy with Regency-adjacent trimmings.

Garson and Olivier

Greer Garson, 35 to Elizabeth’s 20, plays the wit rather than the youth — her sparring with Olivier is the film’s engine, and Olivier’s drawing-room hauteur set the template every later Darcy either follows or reacts against. Olivier himself was reportedly unhappy, having wanted Vivien Leigh cast opposite him. The film won the Academy Award for Best Art Direction (its grand, deliberately anachronistic interiors), and remains the fastest, funniest, least faithful P&P on record — best watched as a screwball cousin of the novel rather than a rendering of it.

What changes from the novel

Beyond the costumes and Lady Catherine’s softened ending, the 1940 film compresses the plot aggressively: Wickham’s elopement with Lydia is handled almost in passing, several of the Bennet sisters barely register as individuals, and the Netherfield ball and Hunsford proposal are both trimmed to their bluntest plot function. Mr. Collins survives mostly intact as pure comic relief, which the broader studio-comedy register actually suits rather well. What the film sacrifices is the novel’s slow-burn structure — the two proposals that anchor Austen’s book arrive here more like plot beats to clear than the emotional hinges the story is built around.

Reception then and now

Contemporary 1940 reviews praised the film’s wit and visual polish while barely mentioning its liberties with the text — a different critical climate than today’s more fidelity-conscious Austen fandom. Modern reassessments tend to treat it as a fascinating period artifact: a snapshot of how Hollywood’s studio system processed a beloved English novel through its own house style, wardrobe department, and contract stars, decades before “faithful adaptation” became the genre’s dominant expectation. It’s rarely anyone’s first Austen film today, but as the one that proved the novel could work as populist entertainment at all, it’s the reason every later adaptation had an audience already primed to want one.

Mary Boland and Edmund Gwenn

Mary Boland’s Mrs. Bennet leans fully into broad comic exasperation, closer to the studio’s screwball house style than to the more grounded, occasionally sympathetic readings later actresses would bring to the role. Edmund Gwenn’s Mr. Bennet, delivered with dry, understated timing, gives the film some of its sharpest individual laugh lines even within a shortened, plot-focused script — proof that the broader comic register didn’t require sacrificing every trace of Austen’s original wit, even where it sacrificed most of her structure. Both performances have aged better than some of the film’s broader plot compressions, offering small, well-timed moments that still land even for viewers who otherwise find the adaptation’s liberties hard to get past. Both actors went on to far more celebrated later work, but neither ever revisited Austen on screen again.