It is a universally acknowledged truth that a movie studio in possession of a good fortune must be in want of Great Books. The desire fulfills two needs: to borrow prestige and flaunt high Anglican taste. In the studio era, the first helped keep watchdogs at bay and the second indulged the very pretensions that triggered Leo the Lion’s roar: ars gratia artis (“art for art’s sake”). The moguls, especially at MGM, meant to entertain and improve minds — or at least wean them from actual books, which, great or not, kept potential customers at home.

Great Books, which for the most part were fat 19th century, English language romances, had other advantages: famous stories in the public domain, inspirational work for costumers, hairdressers, and set designers, and good roles for English expats as villains.That said, the studios dipped into Western lit timidly.If MGM sought titles that underscored the moral certainties of Carvel (Andy Hardy’s hometown, not the custard stand), it was too intimidated to do as much violence to them as it did to contemporary novels, say “Babbitt” or “Tortilla Flat.”As a result, MGM’s best adaptations captured stylistic flavors that the more faithful television adaptations of our own time often ignore.

No better example exists than “Pride and Prejudice,” one of five self-consciously exalted films made at MGM between 1934 and 1940 and collected by Warner Bros. as “Motion Picture Masterpieces.” As Leo the Lion would say, “Aaaarghh!” This is one of those seriously flawed films that remains irresistible and, as many subsequent adaptations prove, inimitable.

Directed far too efficiently by Robert Z.Leonard, who made hundreds of silent films and almost as many talkies without creasing cinema consciousness, it was adapted partly from Helen Jerome’s successful play by the team of Aldous Huxley and contract scenarist Jane Murfin, herself a veteran of the silent era.

Does the film take liberties with Jane Austen? Let us count very few of the ways. Louis B. Mayer demanded it be set half a century later so he could use sumptuous in-house costumes; the Bennett girls seem to have moved to Meryton directly from Tara, though one of Lizzie’s dresses, a shapeless tent with billowing sleeves and a blackpatch top, would be unsuitable in any age.The cast is strangely mature — at 31,Greer Garson is not exactly budding, while Melville Cooper has nearly 20 years on Mr. Collins, whom he nonetheless incarnates.

These alterations are of little or no account. The rank sentimentalization of Lady Catherine (Edna Mae Oliver, superb in her early scenes, compromised into cliché at the last),is more irksome, as is the sadly rushed ending, which betrays the first hour, though I don’t mind that Mary is last seen flirting with a flutist.

Most of the changes to the plot are exigent — the need to dramatize information related in letters. But the omission of the Pemberley scene may be explained only by the insensible parsimony of producer Hunt Stromberg. It’s not only the most dramatic chapter in Austen’s novel, involving two unexpected encounters and the unveiling of an estate as the key to a man’s soul, but the most thoroughly cinematic — a rare instance in which Austen shows as much as she tells.

Still, this film is more faithful to Austen than the dreary English version released last year, which wasted its additional 10-minute running time on a credit roll and a pastoral opening, complete with bleating sheep. The later film’s plot is closer to Austen, though Pemberley is shot like a documentary museum tour, which suggests how limited matters of plot become when approaching a Great Book.

Austen is nothing if not acerbic and funny, her best dialog a fountainhead for the kind of writing that would take wing a century later in the work of Wilde, Huxley, and Coward — which may help to explain why she was so long in finding a devoted audience. Austen raises characterization to an audacious pitch, almost to the level of Moliére in the instance of Mr. Collins.The 1940 film, in which Austen’s wit is augmented by Huxley’s, was one of the funniest chamber comedies of its day, and remains so today.

In contrast, there are few laughs and no wit in the 2005 version, where the actors giggle so derisively they deprive the audience of the chance. Where Leonard’s direction and the script’s machinations suggested Austen’s cool objectivity, the new version, directed by Joe Wright and scripted by Deborah Moggach, aimed for baleful realism, winding up with an accurately cast but dull Collins, a droopy-eyed Darcy (whose vaunted pride seems to stem from fatigue rather than class), and a Mr. Bennett whose final moment, as rendered by Donald Sutherland, laughing through his tears, is Actor Studio kitsch.

The acting in 1940, including Garson’s intelligent rectitude, indemnifies the film against time. Mary Boland and Edmund Gwenn as the Bennetts, Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane, and surprise characterizations by Frieda Inescort as a thoroughly vicious Miss Bingley and Marsha Hunt as a comical Mary, support two ageless performances: Lawrence Olivier as Darcy, underplaying as befits a character slow to show feeling but disclosing every thought anyway (the archery contest, more Robin Hood than Austen and predictable in its outcome, is a masterful comic example), and Melville Cooper’s immortal Mr. Collins, tossing his tails before sitting, walking, and genuflecting at odd angles, flattering with precise nasality, soaking up Lady Catherine’s affability and condescension.

Of the other “Motion Picture Masterpieces” in the Warner Bros. set, George Cukor’s “David Copperfield” remains a savory collection of impeccably cast grotesques — including Edna Mae Oliver, whose Betsy Trotwood has the integrity her Lady Catherine is denied in “Pride.” The big question raised by memoirist David, as to who will play the key role in his life, is unanswerable on film because his resounding centrality in the story is emphasized in his every generously observed sentence. Without David ordering events, he is merely an observer and victim of circumstances set in motion by fate and others.

Cukor chose to emphasize the others at the expense of the novel’s tragic soul, not to mention a good many subplots and characters. But he gained in matchless types true to Dickens and to the 1930s studio repertory company.There’s a reason many people don’t recall who plays the grown David (Frank Lawton) and even little David (Freddie Bartholomew), but can never forget Basil Rathbone’s vile Murdstone, Roland Young’s Heep of infamy, and W. C.Fields’s Micawber, a miraculous transformation that shouldn’t work but does.

The remaining films in the set, though less successful, suggest a unity of time and place with the reappearance of the same actors, same fake sets, and same bathos and sacrificial goodness. Jack Conway’s “A Tale of Two Cities” is a tale of two actors — Ronald Coleman and his unexplained melancholy (it can’t be because he can’t get a date) and Blanche Yurka and her inability to finish a simple coverlet despite her constant, speeddemon knitting. Coleman has the voice but Yurka has the eyes, as she leads thousands of extras against a matte painting.Victor Fleming’s “Treasure Island” has moments, but not enough to counter Jackie Cooper’s whining.

Woody Van Dyke’s “Marie Antoinette” is evidently included on a pass — though they might have sustained a literary conceit with such as-yet-unreleased MGM films of the period as “Huckleberry Finn,” “Ah Wilderness,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and even “The Painted Veil” or “The Human Comedy.” Yet “Marie Antoinette” looks literary, sounds middle-brow, and throws money around as only MGM’s Ancien Régime could; too bad they didn’t divert it to “Pride and Prejudice.” Norma Shearer is no more suitable as Marie than she was as Juliet, but no one had the nerve to suggest to Irving Thalberg’s widow that she play their mothers. Happily, Joseph Shildkraut, John Barrymore, and an epicene Robert Morley are on hand to chew up that very expensive scenery.

Mr. Giddins’s latest book, “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books,” is available from Oxford University Press.