The journey from Norland to Barton Cottage, found in all S&S films, both heritage and appropriations (this from Davies’s 2009 JA’s S&S)
Gentle readers,
As an appendix to my review of Persuasion 2022, plus 4, I’m answering a query I got in three places: what are my choices for Austen films very much worth the watching. I came up with 3 sets for heritage films, and a small group of appropriations. I don’t say others do not have good qualities and interest, but these to me are outstanding.
My criteria: I think a film should convey the book in spirit: the following films are very well done throughout, add to and enrich our understanding of the books, and are works of art in their own right fully achieved
1st set:
1995 Persuasion, BBC, Michell and Dear (Amanda Root & Ciarhan Hinds)
1996 Sense and Sensibility, Miramax, Thompson & Ang (Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet)
1995 Pride and Prejudice, BBC A&E, Andrew Davies & Langton (Colin Firth, Jennifer Ehle)
1983 Mansfield Park, BBC, Giles and Taylor (Sylvestre Le Tousel & Nicholas Farrell)
2007 Northanger Abbey, ITV, Andrew Davies & Jones (Felicity Jones & JJFeilds)
1972 Emma, BBC, John Glenister & Constanduros (Doran Goodwin & John Carson)
Sylvestre Le Tousel as Fanny Price writing from her nest of comforts to her brother William (note his drawing of his ship), one of my favorite chapters in the book (1983 MP)
2nd set
1979 Pride and Prejudice, BBC, Fay Weldon (Elizabeth Garvie & David Rintoul)
2008 ITV (BBC and Warner, among others) Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Andrew Davies & John Alexander (Hattie Morahan, Charity Wakefield)
2009-10 BBC Emma, Jim O’Hanlon, & Sandy Welch (Romola Garai & Johnny Lee Miller)
1999 Miramax Mansfield Park (MP and Juvenilia and JA’s letters), Patricia Rozema (Francis O’Connor & Johnny Lee Miller)
Doran Goodwin as Emma deliberately breaking her shoestring so as to maneuver Harriet and Mr Elton to be alone (1972 Emma)
3rd set
1996 BBC Emma, Davies and Lawrence (Kate Beckinsale & Samantha Morton)
2007 ITV (Clerkenwell in association with WBGH) Persuasion, Snodin & Shergold (Sally Hawkins, Rupert Penry-Jones)
Aubrey Rouget (Carolyne Farina), the Fanny Price character at St Patrick’s Cathedral with her mother, Christmas Eve (Metropolitan is also a Christmas in NYC movie)
Appropriations
2000 Sri Surya Kandukondain Kandukondain or I have found it (S&S), Menon (Tabu, Aishwarya Rai)
1990 Indie Metropolitan (mostly MP, w/Emma), Whit Stillman (Christopher Eigeman, Taylor Nichols, and Carolyn Farina, Allison Rutledge-Parisi, Isabel Gilles)
1993 Republic Ruby in Paradise (NA), Victor Nunez (Ashley Judd, Todd Field)
2008 Granada/ITV/Mammoth/ScreenYorkshire Lost In Austen (P&P), Andrews and Zeff (Jemima Rooper & Elliot Cowan)
2013 BBC Death Comes to Pemberley (P&P), Daniel Percival & Juliette Towhidi (Anna Maxwell Martin, Mathew Rhys)
2007 Mockingbird/John Calley The Jane Austen Book Club (all 6), Robin Swicord (Mario Bello, Kathy Baker, Emily Blunt)
2006 Warner Bros. Lake House (Persuasion), Agresti & Auburn (Sandra Bullock, Keenu Reeves, Christopher Plummer)
Olivia Williams as Jane Austen in reverie, during a walk, facing the river (Miss Austen Regrets)
Biopic
008 BBC/WBGH Miss Austen Regrets (from David Nokes’ biography & JA’s letters) Lovering & Hughes (Olivia Willias, Greta Scacchi, Hugh Bonneville)
See my Austen Filmography for particulars
My Austen Miscellany contains links to many of the blog-reviews I’ve written.
Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood wandering: as Elinor is my favorite of all the heroines, so Hattie Morahan is nowadays my favorite embodiment (Davies’s S&S, Part 3)
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Nancy Mayer: “What did you like about Death Comes to Pemberley? I saw parts of it. I thought Elizabeth didn’t look like a happy bride and it seemed they gave her only two dresses. It seemed to me that they did have the trial at an assize and not in London , as the book did, but I am not sure about that.”
Nancy
My reply:
As to Death Comes to Pemberley, I felt the central concept that once married Elizabeth would have a hard time adjusting to being chatelaine to such a large household, itself part of a community which expected a much richer and much better connected wife for Darcy and mistress for themselves. Similarly I thought there would be bad stumbles on Darcy’s part of dissatisfaction or not quite trusting Elizabeth because he had been brought up to look down on lower rank people. That s central to both book and film. I liked Martin and Rhy’s embodiment of the two central characters, a number of the other actors, the script, the mood — and it was all unified and done well. No sudden haste at the end either.
Finally I thought the film superior to the book. Talk about nodding: whole swatches of PDJames’s novel were repeating passages in P&P and the secondary plot of the movie was well conceived after the adumbration of the novel.
So yes one of the to me top Austen films.
See blogs
Ellen
Well,I haven’t seen the whole movie yet but will, I did check the book out of the library and thought that it was bad Jane Austen and bad P.D.James. I have read many PD James’s mysteries and thought them well done. Of course, I also thought that she didn’t research how crimes were investigated or trials conducted in the regency. My interests take a different form from yours. I did think that what I saw of the film was better than the book and not just because pictures compel more interest than print. The idea that Elizabeth would have problems with a large estate and household and be on edge never entered my mind, though once you mention it, it seems logical. Darcy is not one who easily expresses emotions and doesn’t realize that his wife needs reassurance.
I am afraid that I was wincing at the drab clothes Elizabeth wore and that it appeared she only owned two gowns. She was better dressed when one of 5 daughters.
Nancy
Catriona: Nancy, I agree about Death Comes to Pemberly, the film was an improvement, being more brisk.
My reply:
I don’t care particularly how the actress is dressed, only that it should be at least in alignment with later 18th century styles and tastes. I don’t demand any of the actors or actresses be what the contemporary taste calls beautiful or handsome. In the film as I recall when there is an affair Elizabeth then dresses up; otherwise, she does dress plainly — to my mind that fits her character. She is not vain. I concede I am put off when the actor/actress is what is today called fat — but then I find Turlough Covery (Sanditon, Arthur Parker) just fine. I also am put off when the actress looks truly anorexic, truly over frail — one such actress played Caroline Penvennen in Poldark: it was painful to look at her
PDJames’s book was tedious, repetitive.
There were also some superb performances by other actors: Trevor Eve as Sir Selwyn Hardcastle, the investigative magistrate.
Ellen
Tyler: “I overall agree with the list, but I did like the earlier Northanger Abbey film better – I particularly liked how Catherine was shorn daydreaming about being inside a Gothic novel, which showed her romantic fantasies and was missing from the later film.”
My reply:
It is a list which is rather conservative — underlying the choices are a preference for faithfulness and historical accuracy. Also realistic melodrama and irony; I’m not for pro-establishment comedy, which is not uncommon among the Austen films. So no Clueless and after all Sanditon is out on these grounds too.
Yes I remember that film and it did have merits as a gothic but I probably
now see it as over-done, aching to be an adaptation of Radcliffe. There are others I left out that could be there but I tried to eliminate — so maybe my feeling was the earlier NA was NOT in the spirit of Austen’s book.
I like objections as they make me think about what I value and respond
to in this now large Austen canon.
Ellen
I can see your point, Ellen, about the earlier NA. I think what appealed to me was it was trying to be like a Radcliffe novel. The overall look of the film had that kind of mysteriousness – the steamy Roman baths, the mists at the end when Henry comes to Catherine. I do wish they would make Radcliffe’s novels into films.
Tyler
My reply:
So do I. But it just never will be — too many decades the opportunity has been there. I once tried to interest a publisher who was not academic in a book on Anne Radcliffe; I suppose it was surprising he’d heard of her, but Hamilton press publishes books on Jane Austen and Trollope. He just signaled it was an absurd idea. That reputation of hers descending from the early years of ridicule has never left her name.
Ellen
Kathleen Spaltro: Where do you rank Love and Friendship or Becoming Jane?
Me? I find Austen’s Love and Freindship brilliant burlesque but it goes on for too long. Stillman’s movie is too lush, too stilted and a paradoxically Christianized Lady Susan. I did not care for Becoming Jane: Austen’s creativity is reduced to a response to a love affair with a man that failed.
Rory: I read your blog on the Austen films; one needs to tell a story in a different medium in a different way, as the constraints of that medium – be it film, play, book, audio etc, require.
My favourite P&P is the 1979, perhaps for two reasons: it was the first P&P dramatisation I saw, and also because I think it gets inside Lizzy’s mind best and doesn’t go over the top with flashiness. The 2005 P&P is useful in that it shows the shabby gentility in which the Bennet girls may have been reared – 2000 pounds a year might not go that far with five daughters and Mrs Bennet.
The 1995 Persuasion I like, both in terms of its cinematographic technique (shot using natural light) and also because of the transformation of Amanda Root in course of it – by the end, she has her “bloom” back.
Of the S&S versions, I remember liking the Hattie Morahan (not that I disliked the others). Also I remember the 1972 Emma best of the Emmas. MP I don’t particularly like as a work, but find the Sylvestra Le Touzel version best of a bad lot; Northanger Abbey leaves me cold.
I think I have said to you before that I have reservations about “Death Comes”: I feel it is more a detective story (a typical PD James) set in Pemberley than it is an exploration of the Darcy/Elizabeth relationship, which I feel a sequel to P&P ought be. I don’t fault Anna Maxwell Martin (a great actress), but she/Elizabeth is nearly written out of it by the detective story. Also, being set some years after the Darcy/Elizabeth marriage (one 4/5 year old child), it is set after the period of adaptation of Elizabeth as mistress of Pemberley, which adaptation to the marriage, the house and the society of Derbyshire would probably have been difficult for her, and which adaptation would probably be of most interest to the Austen aficionado.
I read Longbourn once shortly after it appeared and recollect not taking to it. I gave my copy to Debby (without any guiding comment) and independently she had the same reaction; some months ago I found another copy (charity shop, one euro) which I purchased, but haven’t yet nerved myself up enough to re-read it. I recently read “The Other Bennet Sister” by Janice Hadlow. I’m in two minds about this and will postpone comment until I re-read (when?? too much on TBR pile).
Review at
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/the-other-bennet-sister-janice-hadlow-review
My time while away reading a completely different work (classic but little-known SF) allowed me some small insight into the possible crisis Elizabeth might undergo while settling into Pemberley, and I drafted some 500 word approaches to that (longhand, which I can’t read, but my scribble serves as an aide-memoire!) for my sequel to P&P, but am still revolving in my mind whether to scrap my already written existing approach or to blend/expand it.
Sanditon and the Watsons need sympathetic completion; the Watsons destination is mapped out, if not the detail of the path there. Sanditon needs careful completion by a devout Austenologist, not the version currently “sexed up” etc for TV.
Oh yes. Immediately the film has to change the book. It’s not true the film had less information; it has much much more through having pictures, but much is conveyed differently Not all: words are central still; characters, stories, incidents as such.
The truth is I’m torn over the two P&Ps: 1979 and 1995. I agree 1979 conveys the inner life of Elizabeth much more intimately, but the Darcy is too
stiff and simply much more is dramatized in the 1995 and the ending more satisfying. I’m also torn between the 1996 (Thompson) S&S and the 2009 (Hattie Morahan) but except for Willoughby’s speech (a big except) and Edward’s visit (ditto) the 1996 is closer and less exaggerated. Davies turns S&S almost into a Bronte story. I love it but it’s lower according to my criteria.
I found that last or more recent Emma with the sexed-up Knightley (he is no longer Mr Knightley but “George” is not a popular name) actually offensive: the actor was dressed in a soft-core porn way. I am attached to Mr Knightley and to see the character so degraded into “see male animal here” appalled me. This occasioned the complete loss of the tone at ending part of story — how could Emma learn anything from this refuge from a rock-star concert.
You have to give appropriations slack. They begin with the of transposing story often in time; they do change the genre. I am seduced in Death Comes by the idea and embodiment of Elizabeth and Darcy as having rocky time in the early part of their marriage. If I keep up my Austen sequel “kick” I’d read Catherine Schrine’s Three Weissmans and/or Kathleen Flynn’s The Jane Austen project (it’s time traveling by two scientists back to the later 18th century). Partly I’m exploring Joanna Trollope for the coming fall course.
I like that precis of the Other Bennet Sister. I will order a cheap copy. I thought Baker’s novel that good it’s almost an original novel in its own right — Mary Reilly is an original novel in its own right — but Baker has not created a truly separate book which can stand on its own too. I see the still she chose; Wright tries to make Mary much more human, less a caricature Jane Austen can be very cruel.
I agree. Watsons is thoroughly detailed; I tried to read The Younger Sister by Catherine Anne Hubback: what is wrong is she is ever worrying about the other relatives reading it and so changes the original story too much; it is a genuine attempt at a sequel though. Hard to get at one time: I have a facsimile of the 1st 2 volumes . The Austen family had somehow put a stop to circulation of the third volume (that’s how much they loathe anything known about this family) and I got that separately from Diana Birchall — at the time typed copies of Volume 3 actually circulated (like Samisdat). I’m told that’s no longer the case at all. But it would not be cheap as you’d have to buy each volume of a facsimile separately.
I like Christopher Brindle’s play adaptation: it makes sense of the story and follows the hints from Anne Austen Lefroy’s brief attempt at finishing the novel but he’s not that strong a writer. I have blogs here on Brindle’s adaptation and it’s available to be watched as a video (just google Brindle and Sanditon).
It’s fun talking about these books. I love Austen more thoroughly than Trollope.
Ellen