A Room with a View - E. M. Forster [103]
Inspired by A Room with a View
The 1985 film adaptation of A Room with a View first brought independent film company Merchant Ivory Productions to the public’s attention. Producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory followed their Oscar-winning production with adaptations of two other E. M. Forster novels: Maurice (1987), the story of a love affair between two young men of different social classes, and Howards End (1992), the 1910 novel that cemented Forster’s reputation in the literary world.
In 1961 Ivory, an American, and Merchant, a native of Bombay, formed a production company to film English-language pictures in India for the world market. Like Forster, who went on to write his masterpiece A Passage to India (1924), Ivory spent years in India, and he shot many films there, including Shakespeare Wallah (1965). Ivory also shares Forster’s interest in Italy: Venice: Themes and Variations (1957) was the director’s documentary thesis in cinema school.
In A Room with a View, Helena Bonham Carter plays a charmingly vexed Lucy Honeychurch, and renowned actress Maggie Smith is Charlotte Bartlett, Lucy’s fussbudget chaperone. With good pacing, beautiful cinematography, and excellent direction, Forster’s novel comes alive on the screen in a manner exceptional for literary adaptations, as in the exuberant swimming scene and in thoughtful set pieces, such as the question mark inked above George Emerson’s dresser. Mr. Emerson stole scene after scene in the novel, and Denholm Elliott does the same onscreen.
A Room with a View brought Merchant Ivory Productions nominations for eight Academy Awards, including best picture, best director, and best cinematography. Two of the film’s supporting actors—Denholm Elliott and Maggie Smith—were also nominated. The film won Oscars for art direction and costumes, and for the screenplay, written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the Booker Prize-winning novelist who has often collaborated on Merchant Ivory films.
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
R. A. SCOTT JAMES
There is just enough that is right in Mr. Forster to triumph over the mass of him that seems to us to be wrong. There is no use denying that he begins by irritating us exceedingly. He is full of views; what is worse, he is full of subtlety, a subtlety that rises up and assails you in pregnant epigram or paraded restraint. He insists on assuming—with that blind faith in unrealities which only the ‘intellectual’ is capable of—that Early Victorian rules of propriety are the rules of today, and he flagellates these extinct, or, at least, dying, moral mannerisms with caustic, but belated, satire....
And yet [A Room with a View] is a brilliant novel, a novel which begins by being brilliantly dull and ends by being humanly absorbing. The author gradually gets into his stride, and comes to know his own characters, and make us know them. Dull and trivial as they may seem, they learn to be natural, and the prim, semi-suburban, the conventional is suddenly brought into contrast with the primitive earnestness of flesh and blood and feeling....
Mr. Forster breaks through the bonds of his own art; the very lessons he began laboriously to teach crumble beneath the central human facts which at the last hold his and our attention. The fine, primitive, deep things which do not deny the flesh, even if they are not ‘of it,’ are dear to him, so that he forgets his horrible artificialities, and becomes genuine. The book grows on the reader, and, if he reads with care, he will have cause to be grateful to Mr. Forster.