Lifts and separates
Well, here is a P&P3 still we haven’t seen yet…
In other P&P3 news, Paul from KeiraWeb.com writes to tell us that Variety has reported that the MPAA rating for P&P3 will be PG-13 (the official site still says it is unrated). Must be the Regency CleavageTM, although in this case we suppose it is properly Georgian CleavageTM.
Actually, we have always wondered why people think P&P is so innocent. We doubt that Lydia and Wickham spent their time playing whist during the fortnight in which they cohabited in London, and Mr. Bennet says flat-out to Lizzy that he fears she will have an affair if she marries a man she cannot respect. In the 1940 film version of P&P, the Hays office (which censored films in the U.S. from the 1930s until the MPAA ratings were established in the 1960s) would not allow the filmmakers to portray Mr. Collins as a clergyman, because it was disrespectful to portray a clergyman as a buffoon. Tame old Jane Austen, unable to pass the prewar respectability test; who would have thought it?
P.S. Private to the author of the piece: that’s Knightley and Macfadyen.
July 20th, 2005 at 4:10 am
Just to let you know … this isn’t a P&P still. It’s actually from a scene in the first Pirates of the Caribbean - no clue why they labeled it P&P! Cheers!
July 20th, 2005 at 11:38 am
Yeah, it really gets my goat when people superimpose Victorian values on a society that pre-dates the Victorian era. The Victorians INVENTED sexual repression (as we know it) you fools! And they lived AFTER Jane Austen… Humph.
(Aldous Huxley wrote the 1940 screenplay of P&P?! Well, knock me over with a feather…)
July 20th, 2005 at 12:18 pm
Sophia J/ Yes, you’re right! Must be a v. cunning strategy from the famous Working Title publicity machine…hmmm.
July 20th, 2005 at 12:22 pm
Jen, I moved the comment here for you, but I think you were really replying to Sarah anyway!
And thanks to Sarah, I thought that was a little odd but now I recall that part of PotC. I only saw it once when it first came out.
(Aldous Huxley wrote the 1940 screenplay of P&P?! Well, knock me over with a feather…)
Oh, I know! Almost as good as the idea of Peter Cushing playing Mr. Darcy (which he did in an old BBC production…they really gotta let that one out of the archives).
July 20th, 2005 at 10:28 pm
While P&P isn’t innocent, all the stuff in the book that would make it worthy of a PG-13 rating takes place off-stage, so to speak. We hear about it in fairly general terms and are left to fill in the blanks, we don’t witness it in a full-color TMI way. I hope that Variety is wrong about the rating, although I have no idea how likely that is.
That old newspaper clipping was fascinating–thanks for linking it, Mags!
July 20th, 2005 at 11:34 pm
If you like that, Amy, check out all the Alberta Burke Notebooks at Goucher College. Mrs. Burke kept clippings on Jane Austen all her life and bequeathed them to Goucher. Lots of stuff on P&P0. They are sort of the analog version of AustenBlog.
July 21st, 2005 at 8:57 am
The Alberta Burke Notebooks are AMAZING… Thanks for the link, I think it’ll keep me occupied for some time now…
July 21st, 2005 at 5:02 pm
Mags, thank you! What a treasure trove!
(Or maybe I shouldn’t thank you so enthusiastically, since I will undoubtedly be spending hours and hours and hours poring through the notebooks when I should be doing something else…oh, well. It won’t be the first time that’s happened with me and Jane stuff.
)
July 21st, 2005 at 6:26 pm
Thank you, Mags. I guess so, too!