The Latest Chapter in the Austen Renaissance

At a Santa Monica movie theater showing genteel “Sense and Sensibility,” a fight broke out in the packed audience just prior to the feature when a slender man who looked to be in his 60s tried to evict a fairly small boy from one of the seats he was holding for his parents. Ignoring squatters’ rights, the aging ruffian demanded the seat for himself. Shouts and pushing ensued, and soon a couple of rows were involved in the scuffle.

Amazing how Jane Austen turns people into animals.

So hold your temper, be cool and enjoy. Coming to cable’s A&E; channel are three nights of “Pride and Prejudice,” six hours from the BBC that parcel out Austen’s best-known comedy of manners, courtships and teacups, and that use humor and gaiety to lighten the gloomy social constrictions of late 18th century England.

The sumptuous sights of countryside grandeur and mansions right out of Architectural Digest aren’t hard to digest, either.

An earlier BBC production of “Pride and Prejudice” aired on PBS’ “Masterpiece Theatre” in 1980, naturally without commercials. A&E;, on the other hand, not only depends on commercials (which you accept), but generally hacks out space for them with a chainsaw (which you don’t accept).

Not to worry when it’s a rerun of “Banacek,” “McCloud” or “Law & Order.” Otherwise? Unless A&E;’s leatherfaces have been recently sensitized, expect all-too-frequent, uncivilized jolts with no regard for timing or what the commercials are interrupting. Expect to see the stately country green of Mr. Bingley’s Netherland Park or Mr. Darcy’s Pemberley crashing into an ad for a sushi restaurant.

But listen: So fabulously feel-good is this latest “Pride and Prejudice” that even clumsily applied pit stops aren’t likely to drain its pleasures.

A large chunk of America surely knows by now about the curious Austenizing of the arts these days, about the movies “Persuasion” and “Sense and Sensibility” and the praise they’ve earned from most critics, about “Emma” being the loose model for the contemporary comedy “Clueless,” about the dramatic leap in sales of some of Austen’s novels as a bonus.

And given the fiscal and critical high marks driving this phenomenon, who knows what plans are afoot by TV literati to further extend Austen’s accessibility and cash in on her renaissance. Perhaps a “Pride and Prejudice” sitcom a la “Friends”:

Sisters Lizzie, Jane, Lydia, Kitty and Mary kick back in their Derbyshire dining parlor with Mr. Darcy, Mr. Bingley and Mr. Wickham, taking refreshment while recollecting the inferiority of their connections. The fun and high jinks begin when the insolent and disagreeable Lady Catherine de Bourgh pops in unannounced to discuss a report of an alarming nature.

Well, perhaps not.

For now, we have before us the decidedly agreeable “Pride and Prejudice” on A&E.; Purists may quibble with Simon Langton’s direction or Andrew Davies’ script, which takes some liberties (although fewer than Emma Thompson’s did with “Sense and Sensibility”). Yet even if, in the manner of yours truly, you’ve missed the 1940 film of “Pride and Prejudice” with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, read only a bit of Austen and forgotten many of “Pride’s” nuances, you still may find yourself irresistibly immersed and fighting with others over the best seat in front of the set.

The seduction begins almost immediately. Although appearing quite comfortably situated in their Longbourn house with servants to tend many of their needs, the Bennets are said to be of relatively modest circumstances. Because Mr. Bennet (Benjamin Whitrow) has willed his estate to his clergyman cousin, that smarmy toad Mr. Collins (David Bamber), Mrs. Bennet (Alison Steadman) is terrified that she and their five daughters will be penniless and homeless upon her husband’s death. So she is determined--foolishly in a panic, in fact--to wed her favorite, eldest and supposedly prettiest daughter, Jane (Susannah Harker), to a rich new neighbor, Charles Bingley (Crispin Bonham-Carter), who is good for a cool 4,000 to 5,000 pounds a year.

“At least,” chirps Mrs. Bennet, happily.

Although mutually attracted, however, their romance is initially stunted by the epic money and class gaps separating them.

Looming largest in this rigid universe are not Jane and Bingley, however, but the next eldest daughter, the smart and spirited, witty and radiant Lizzie (Jennifer Ehle), and her adversarial connection to Fitzwilliam Darcy (Colin Firth), an even wealthier and loftier young man who at first is so contemptuous of the Bennets and their lesser rank (“so decidedly below my own”) that he can hardly stand being in their presence. He scowls, he broods. An easy man to dislike, you think. Nor is the strong-willed Lizzie any less tolerant of him.

His pride, her prejudice. A standoff.

Yet their eyes are always locking across crowded ballrooms, signaling a stirring sexual tension that will dissolve to a gradual softening of animosity en route--several hours ahead, after Lizzie learns what’s what about the scandalous George Wickham (Adrian Lukis)--to a pleasing resolution that also will extend to Jane and Bingley. They’re happy, you’re happy, it works.

As do Firth’s smoldering Darcy and Ehle’s luminous Lizzie, who while spiny, undaunted and with good reason her father’s favorite, remains a woman of her repressive times. Aglow, yet limited. Ehle is lovely to watch in the role, rising to Austen’s own anointing of Lizzie as being “as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print.”

She supplies occasional humor, too, although that falls largely to the garishly fawning Mr. Collins, the frivolous, loud-jabbering Mrs. Bennet, whose life’s work is to see her daughters marry well, and her caustic husband, who remarks at one point about his silly trio of youngest girls, “I shall not hear two words of sense spoken together.”

You’ll be happy to hear that “Pride and Prejudice” is many words of sense spoken together.

* “Pride and Prejudice” airs Sunday at 5 and 9 p.m. and continues Monday and Tuesday at 6 and 10 p.m. on A&E; cable.