'Sense and Sensibility' (1981) - TV Review

In the 1970s and 1980s, BBC TV worked its way through all six of Jane Austen's well-known novels. This is one of that series, with Irene Richard and Tracey Childs as Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, and Robert Swann, Peter Woodward, and Bosco Hogan as Colonel Brandon, John Willoughby, and Edward Ferrars respectively. If you don't recognize the actors' names ... they weren't well-known then either.

Each interpretation of Austen requires that there be a screenwriter to adapt the novel for the screen. And each must choose between using Austen's words, or condensing what she wrote, or re-interpreting. I can't say that there's even a consensus on which is best: the well-loved Colin Firth version of Pride and Prejudice stays very close to the original text, but the superb Ang Lee version of this book sticks closely to the spirit of Austen's writing while using little of her actual prose.

I would say that 50% of the words that came out of people's mouths in this rendition are true to Austen - which leaves us with 50% being the work of the screenwriter. And this is one of the instances where it would have been better to stick with Austen's original text. This is seven episodes of about 26 minutes each, and I was surprised to find myself mostly buying into it by the last episode - a bit late, but I hadn't expected to at all after some of the failures. It's not a bad production, but one thing I felt they failed to let us see is that Elinor and Marianne love each other very much. Yes, they're very different, and they often disagree (this version showed us both of those things), but they also love each other - and this version didn't really convey that.

After having (re)watched the BBC TV version (also part of this set) from 1980 of "Pride and Prejudice," I was well reminded that there are far worse versions of Austen (that one has spectacularly wooden acting, on top of a petty and unkind interpretation of all of Austen's prose - by Fay Weldon no less). This isn't a bad production, but prefer the 1995 Ang Lee or the 2008 TV version adapted by Andrew Davies - both are excellent and better than this.