“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” goes one of the more famous opening lines in English literature, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
That’s Jane Austen, beginning her 1813 “Pride and Prejudice.” Austen herself has nothing to do with “Mr. Malcolm’s List,” the clever, entertaining and delectably pretty new film starring Freida Pinto — but also everything. It’s our collective thirst for such Regency-era “comedies of manners,” examining the intense matchmaking activity of a certain level of British society, that has given rise to this, to TV’s “Bridgerton,” to the 2020 “Emma” adaptation with Anya Taylor-Joy, and other films too numerous to name.
