Jane Austen's acerbic courtship comedy deliciously underscored the falseness of feminine enfeeblement amid the pretensions of the English upper classes. This first-rate adaptation is distinguished by a screenplay by Aldous Huxley, whose 20th-century sense matches Austen's 19th-century sensibility. The superb cast includes Greer Garson as Lizzie Bennet, Laurence Olivier as Mr. Darcy and Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane Bennet. Cinematography by German emigré Karl Freund (Metropolis, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Camille, etc.) is a key to the success of the film. In his book Novels into Film, George Bluestone comments on the visual way in which the film “faithfully embodies the dialectic of Jane Austen's central ironies.... Critics more sensitive to literary than to cinematic effects would tend to miss the quiet plastic accomplishments of the production: they would overlook the fact that the understatements of the camera are exactly suited to those epigrammatic understatements we have come to associate with Jane Austen's style.”